Keywords

1 Introduction – Institutionalization of Childhood

The life phase childhood is structured by a multitude of institutions. Actual childhoods have to move in the orderly tracks of welfare-state regulations (Mierendorff 2010), of expert knowledge and what guidelines are derived from it (Bühler-Niederberger 2010), and of educational institutions and the exact roadmap and timetable through childhood that these prescribe (König and Bühler-Niederberger 2022). They are also structured by language and rules of communication, i.e. of how and what to speak to and about children and how and what children are entitled to respond (Speier 1976), by the market and its products that support the staging of the right, just ‘childlike child’ (Cook 2016), by public and private spaces and places and by their equipment (Zinnecker 1990; Renonciat 1994; Gerke-Riedlin 2002) – this list might be continued.

The shaping of this life phase therefore does not follow a situational logic, in the sense of: What is most appropriate at a particular moment, under given circumstances and for a given child? Nor does it follow a logic of available economic and human resources, in the sense of: What can be spent on the child, what, if any, efforts must children contribute themselves, and what persons are available at the moment who can be supportive? Such logics should rather be applied only in emergency situations and temporarily. And likewise, the concrete design of this phase of life follows the articulated needs or existing competencies of the people involved only to a very limited extent. The latter limitation applies not only to children, but also to the adults involved when they act in relation to children. In Germany, for example, childhoods are still largely standardized, also in terms of family size and shape and hence they imply a strong gender care gap (Bühler-Niederberger 2020a). Meanwhile, other phases of life are largely negotiable; adulthood, for example, is now quite open in terms of timing and lifestyle, and the available economic resources play an important role for the respective choice. The latter also applies to older age, where one can retire, or can or even must continue to work, or can study, or even – at least this is true for the elderly men – can now take on the role of parents (possibly even for the second time).

When it is said here that childhood is largely structured, this does not mean that in the concrete case things would run as if on its own. But the actions of all those involved are guided by the specifications, draw the resources they need from the structural conditions or come up against their limits, and experience their social approval or disapproval within this normative framework. To the extent that the participants orient themselves in this way, they reinforce the validity of the structures or occasionally bring about some relaxations and changes.

In this chapter, the problem with this structuring of childhood is seen not only as the fact that it complicates situational solutions. On the contrary, the permanent regulation of social relations can simplify the actions of participants, it can be a protection for the participants against unfavorable solutions, it can contain the right to get support and much more. Undoubtedly, these institutions of childhood were also created with this idea of protection and support. The problem rather lies in the fact that the structures thus created are characterized by fundamental inequality. This does not simply mean inequality between age groups, in the sense of an unequal and always relationally structured participation in social resources of children versus adults. The latter has so far been primarily addressed by the notion of “generational order” (Alanen 2009). Rather, the childhood pattern as it applies in contemporary societies establishes social inequality quite principally: between the social classes of a society and increasingly also between entire societies. This article wants to deal with the origins, elements and the hegemonic nature of this pattern and open the horizon for the thinking of other solutions.

2 ‘Good Childhood’ – A Pattern of Distinction

Through all of the regulations and institutions around childhood, ‘good childhood’ is supposed to be produced. ‘Good childhood’ is a normative pattern in two ways. On the one hand, the actors have to orientate themselves in all decisions concerning children on the (respective) guidelines, as far as their scope of action is not limited by the already mentioned institutions anyway. Secondly, it is an outstanding social value: this first phase of life, childhood, must be ‘good’ (Bühler-Niederberger 2010). This is a demand that is made of later phases of life with much less urgency. A ‘good childhood’ distinguishes persons who have one – conversely, it also distinguishes persons if they do or did not have one – and certain expectations can be placed on their probation in later life accordingly. To guarantee a ‘good childhood’ also values the persons who are or were able to provide it for their offspring, as parents, as “good mothers” (Badinter 1981; Schütze 1991; König et al. 2021). It also brings moral credit to politicians, indeed entire societies, when they engage on behalf of the country’s children (Bühler-Niederberger 2010). In the case where they were not able, it does so in a correspondingly negative way. Growing up in modern Western societies cannot be understood beyond this normative pattern of ‘good childhood’, therefore, I made this term the core concept of my exposition on the life phase of childhood and also called it there an “important element of social recognition” (Bühler-Niederberger 2020a, p. 131). One can also argue, with good reason, that the new social science research on childhood, insofar as it pursues sociopolitical claims, e.g., with its concepts of well-being (Ben-Arieh 2008) or participation (Tisdall et al. 2014), does not transgress this normative pattern. On the contrary, it is likely to add new dimensions of ‘good childhood’ to those already present, such as the experience of self-efficacy for children and the development of their independent personality. It can be said that – quite paradoxically – it is now precisely the autonomy of children that belongs to the obligations that adults perceive as theirs (De Singly 2005).

Given this importance of the normative pattern of ‘good childhood’, it is not surprising that this pattern is also being struggled over: What should it entail, to whom should it apply, how should it be realized, and how should deviations be sanctioned? These disputes can best be shown historically. If one goes back to the 19th century, the idea of the ‘good childhood’ and the obligation to ensure such a childhood did not have the absolute obviousness – one may even call it ‘naturalness’ – that it then possessed from the 20th century onward and possesses today more strongly than ever. It was the bourgeoisie at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries – as an initially small group of educated citizenry, entrepreneurs and merchants (Kocka 2008) – that declared the form of growing up of its children, which it had developed and cultivated, to be the superior childhood. This claim was successfully enforced: To this day, and now worldwide, the notion of ‘good growing up’ follows this model. Its basic features are the separation of children from the contexts of public life, the careful and sophisticated design of a segregated children’s world (Schlumbohm 1983; Sommerville 1990), the prominent role of the mother in the supervision and nurturing of children (Badinter 1981; Schütze 1991; Cunningham 2005) and the responsibility of experts for the design and monitoring of secluded childhoods (Beekman 1977; Hardyment 2007).

The bourgeoisie thus set itself apart from the rest of society not only through education or economic skill and success, but also quite explicitly through its private lifestyle, the form of the family and precisely the shaping of childhood. The distinction applied to the nobility: one became a member of the nobility by birth. To become a member of the bourgeoisie, however, one had to be raised and educated properly. That was the self-confident definition of one’s own bourgeois status and the right of access to it (Budde 1994, p. 11). Insofar as children were also educated in the nobility – even if the bourgeoisie did not accept this as proper education – different principles applied. The aristocratic ‘education in the world for the world’ (Vohwinckel 1991) is well summed up by the sentence of a general from the original nobility at the turn of the 19th century: “Life educates the man, and little do words mean.”Footnote 1 This general, who achieved great prestige during his life, joined the military regiment at the age of 13. He performed – as he describes – an exceedingly hard army service, considering his still small body size, which began every day in the earliest morning hours. He was appointed an officer at the age of 14 and, shortly afterwards, went to war in Poland with his regiment. Unthinkable for a child of the bourgeoisie: in the education of the children of the bourgeoisie one did not rely at all on the uncontrollable lessons that life holds out; just the other way around, one very carefully protected the children from these. Their nursery and education also clearly distinguished the children of the bourgeoisie from the little folk and the growing group of workers. The children of the little folk stayed in the streets most of the time (Farge 1992; Schlumbohm 1983), all the more because the apartments were too small. When they enjoyed themselves in the streets, they gave rise to all sorts of anger and complaints from the adults but they pursued their occupations in here as well – as street vendors, by running errands, making deliveries, collecting horse manure, playing, gambling, etc. – which also served to secure the livelihood of their families.

The education of the bourgeoisie made great demands on the time of the adults and on other resources. Seclusion from the ‘lessons of life’ – which came to the children of both the nobility and the little folk – demanded that learning experiences be arranged carefully and appropriately for children. Toys, books, and appropriate spaces were required for this ‘surrogate childhood’, as well as people to supervise and guide the children. Everything had to be substituted, e.g. also the stay in the nature, which was replaced by cold showers, by gymnastic equipment and exercises, which served the hardening of the body in the protected area (Beekman 1977). It was also necessary to free the mother from other tasks that would have competed with her educational duties. Undoubtedly, then, this childhood was not a model for all classes, neither for the aristocracy, where women fulfilled their social obligations, nor for the little people, who lacked the appropriate resources and needed every workforce for subsistence. It must be clearly stated here that this form of childhood was in no way developed under the maxim of a childhood for all. Rather, it was created precisely to give one’s own offspring an advantage over the other children, to raise the children to be heirs to one’s own favored social position.

An important element of this new understanding of childhood was and remains the involvement of experts. The production of middle-class childhood can be described as an “expert enterprise” (Bühler-Niederberger 2020a, p. 113). A group of members of new professions and scientific specializations not only helped the new ideas to break through, but the representatives of these ideas also established themselves as increasingly recognized experts; above all, these were pedagogues, pediatricians and experts in welfare policy. The idea that it takes experts to explain what to do with children, that is, that child development must be explained not only to educators or wet nurses but to all non-specialists, even parents, was by no means self-evident at first. In the course of time, this created a professional market for an entire army of experts, which is still growing today and is constantly being further differentiated (Donzelot 2005; Schütze 1991). The alliance between the experts and the parents of the middle class remained intact even as this social group grew larger in the 20th century and became the broad middle class in the societies of the West.

It took considerable time for the lower classes to open up to the messages of the experts on the new education and to accept the programs of childhood that were now to apply to all children. This adoption of the new childhood pattern did not happen without a certain amount of pressure. The pressure was on the working-class parents, who were also accused of not loving their children enough, but of taking advantage of them (Zelizer 1985; Mahood 1995; De Coninck-Smith 1997). But it was also on the children, who were reluctant to accept the loss of the important function they had for their families and the loss of the freedom in the streets, which, conversely, was also granted to them. Various historical sources attest to precisely this self-confidence of children of lower classes, both in urban and rural areas. Accordingly, teachers felt these children, and especially the boys, were a poor fit for their student roles (Sommerville 1990, p. 245; De Coninck-Smith 1997; Hurt 1979; Hendrick 1997).

The alliance between experts and the middle class is particularly impressive where it has endured even through significant paradigm shifts in the education demanded. Such changes are not uncommon, despite the constancy of the childhood pattern, for example, with regard to the separated world of children. One can think, for instance, of changing attitudes regarding punishment (Heinze and Heinze 2013), or of reversals in the question of letting young children cry (Badinter 1981; Hardyment 2007). Two examples, however, are particularly apt to demonstrate the stable alliance. First, a compilation of research on parenting behavior in the pre- and post-World War II periods reveals the following: While lower-class mothers were more permissive than middle-class mothers before World War II in terms of feeding on demand, longer breastfeeding, and toilet training, the reverse was true after World War II. Now middle-class mothers breastfed more frequently and longer, followed a less rigid schedule of meals for young children, and began toilet training later. Both before World War II and after, middle-class mothers were thus closer to the expert advice. Conversely, according to the experts, the lower-class mothers were wrong at both points in time (Bronfenbrenner 1958). The second example concerns the employment of mothers with young children. Working-class women from the 1950s to the 1970s were more likely to be employed than middle-class women and were also more likely to take their children to day care centers. During this time, working mothers and early out-of-home care were considered problematic; there was talk of “stray children” and “latchkey children”. Experts warned of neglect, attachment problems, etc. A report by the German government in 1966 clearly rejected the employment of mothers (cf. Sommerkorn and Liebsch 2016). Since then, however, the expert opinion has changed: “exclusive parental care” is now seen as a social problem and as a problem, that primarily concerns mothers at risk of poverty and with little education, in short, a problem of the lower social strata (Schober and Stahl 2014).

If the correspondence between expert recommendations and middle-class practice is striking, the converse is true as well: lower-class education is always considered deficient, always in need of catching up. To this day, the negative image of parents from lower social strata persists in discourses on educational behavior, including the figure of ‘educationally deprived parents’ (Betz 2018). Although the parents of the lower social classes continuously adapted their behavior to that of middle-class parents, nevertheless, they have always lagged behind somewhat – and if only because the middle classes have always increased their commitment (Schaub 2015). Similarly, lower-class children increased their rate of university graduation, but they continue to lag behind the middle class, which also increased its educational attainment (Geissler 2014). Here, the lower educational attainment is not only due to lower performance, but also to poorer evaluation by teachers. In Germany, this evaluation bias is very clear at the transition to the Gymnasium, the academic track, after the fourth school year; teachers' recommendations for this highest school level clearly favor (all else being equal) students from families with higher social backgrounds (Stubbe et al. 2017).

The idea that the offspring needs an intensive cultivation, which is time-consuming and cost-intensive and must be detached from everyday activities, has become a valid and no longer questioned theory of human development. A multitude of meanwhile familiar theoretical terms capture and cement the notion that children’s performance is a matter of parental investment in their nurturing – according to the logic: the more, the better! The concepts of a “primary and secondary effect of origin” are to be mentioned here – which were taken over from Boudon (1974) and aim at the class-specific socialization and the level of aspiration for the educational career of the offspring. The concepts of “cultural capital” (Bourdieu 1983) and the “transmission model” (Georg 2015) should also be mentioned. The latter term then captures the transmission of cultural capital to the next generation; and it has long been considered an incontrovertible truth that this is greater in the higher social strata and more conducive to the next generation. Lareau (2003) speaks of “concerted cultivation” to capture middle-class efforts at cultivation (see also Vincent and Ball 2007). The OECD has adopted this idea and forms an “index of cultural capital” in the PISA studies and the report emphasizes the importance of “books, games and interactive learning materials” for educational success (OECD 2019, p. 50). Other models of education have long since lost their validity, making it impossible nowadays to claim that “life educates the man”.

3 ‘Good Childhood’ – The Global Claim

The pattern of the ‘good childhood’ with its intensive promotion of children by their parents is a pattern of inequality. No wonder, after all, this childhood was accompanied by the intention of creating a privileged position for one’s own offspring. It has remained a pattern of inequality in the countries where its history started, due to the high material and time demands it makes, which – as far as corresponding studies for the period after World War II show – have moreover been continuously increased (Bianchi 2000; Schaub 2015). It is not without a certain irony that this conception of childhood, of all things and despite its long-recognized flaws, is now claimed to have worldwide and exclusive validity.

The critical discussion about the fact that the pattern of ‘good childhood’, as it is valid in Western societies, becomes hegemonic worldwide and is thus transferred without further ado to other societies, was taken up some time ago (Boyden 1990). So far, however, this critique has mainly been based on two phenomena. On the one hand, it problematizes the low acceptance of children’s work in countries of the Global South which the pattern entails (cf. Niewenhuys 2005; Liebel 2004), as only school childhood is accepted as adequate childhood. This is said to be accompanied by a devaluation of working children, and this may render the situation of these children even more difficult (Jacquemin 2006). On the other hand, “decolonial childhood studies” problematize the individualizing point of view, which they believe to recognize e.g. in the UN children’s right but as well in the concepts of Western dominated childhood studies. This individualizing perspective – such is the critique – does not do justice to the manifold anchoring of children of the Global South in social relations, their way to locate themselves in the collective, their agency as relationally constituted and embedded (Abebe et al. 2022; Afroze 2022).

These critiques refer to two global developments – scholarization and the implementation of (allegedly individualistic) children’s rights. And indeed, these two developments should be investigated by childhood studies in terms of their impact on childhood in the respective countries. However, these two developments do not necessarily have to be seen as the (often criticized) transfer of 'Western' ideas. One could also see a modernization of its own kind in these developments, in the sense of multiple modernization (Eisenstadt 2020). That is, schooling and adoption of children’s rights may simply have occurred in the course of growing prosperity, the development of middle classes, the expansion of public administrations, in short, of developments that can be observed frequently today, especially in Asian countries. Nor are schools a Western invention, but rather a solution of states worldwide when they need staffs of civil servants and use meritocratic criteria (or pretend to use these criteria) for their recruitment – which they do not least to stabilize internal power relations. In other words, schools have a much longer and broader tradition that goes far beyond the childhood pattern of the (Western) bourgeoisie and even precedes it in time, think for instance of China and Japan (Dardess 1991). With regard to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, this is even in a recognizable tension with the extent to which children are dependent on their parents in the Western pattern of the ‘good childhood’. This was demonstrated not least in the attempt – which failed for the time being precisely because of these parental rights – to enshrine children’s rights in the Basic Law of the Federal Republic of Germany (Kittel and Funke 2022). And the international organizations that are engaged in the enforcement of worldwide education or sanctioning of child labor or children’s rights in general may be influenced by Western ideas of modernization, but their composition is – as their name implies – primarily international.

Thus, if one wants to criticize the transfer of Western notions of childhood to other societies, one must start out with the the notion of an intensively nurtured child, the very core of the pattern of ‘good childhood’. For here a transfer of Western ideas has clearly taken place. Under conditions of mass poverty and poorly developed welfare states, such a resource-intensive model is particularly problematic. However, with increasing self-evidence, the expectation is now being placed on parents worldwide that they should nurture their children, stimulate them intellectually, and do so with activities that are removed from everyday contexts, i.e., by reading aloud, taking the children outside to play, engaging in word and number training with young children, and so on. This requirement is recognizable in reports such as those written around the World Bank (cf. Hasan et al. 2013, for Indonesia). It is also recognizable in the “Multiple Cluster Surveys”, statistical surveys conducted by UNICEF in conjunction with the statistical offices of the respective countries.Footnote 2 There are mostly middle- and low-income countries in which these surveys are regularly conducted. I take a closer look at three reports on Asian middle-income countries that were recently compiled to illustrate how the claim for ‘good childhood’ is made in these reports. These are the reports on Bangladesh (Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics and UNICEF 2019), on Kyrgyzstan (National Statistical Committee of Kyrgyz Republic and UNICEF 2019) and on Tonga (Tonga Statistic Departments 2020). The three surveys assess the extent of specific parental support and lament it as too low in all the corresponding publications. They do not explain in detail what the negative effect for the children or their societies might be. The only argument that is made for more parental involvement is the low scores on developmental scales for young children that the surveys found. These scales are taken over from Western countries without further ado (Adriany and Saefullah 2015). While the children in these three countries may meet standards in terms of social and physical development, they are below the values set as valid in terms of cognitive development. And, as if cultural ignorance could not be pushed further already at the level of measurement, a distinction is made in these surveys between the nurturing efforts of mother and father versus those (less valued) of other adults in the family. This fails to take into account that in some Asian countries, the family goes well beyond the nuclear core as seen from the perspective of the children (see also Wilmes and Andresen 2015). In all these reports, the arguing proceeds by comparing poorer and richer households within the country. It is uniformly stated that in poorer households the situation is worse once again: book ownership is lower or absent, reading aloud is less frequent, drawing is less frequent as well, etc. Correspondingly, the values of poor children in poor countries are also worse once again. The whole structure of the argumentation in the reports shows very clearly that the pattern of ‘good childhood’ is introduced from the very beginning in its most socially unequal form possible. It is the old familiar message: poor parents must make more of an effort if their children are to achieve anything. This – according to the message – is the only way for individuals and society to succeed.

Such a global campaign for a Western-style fostered childhood is insensitive to local conditions in several ways. First, given the scarce resources of the poorer and rural populations in the countries now being targeted, it establishes a new hierarchy that this population cannot possibly reduce. Using book ownership or making walks with the child as indicators of promising socialization is downright absurd given the conditions. How should one own and store books in a region where many people live in one-room houses and with minimal furniture (as the author found this in her own research in rural regions of Kyrgyzstan (Bühler-Niederberger and Schwittek 2014))? Or what paths and places should one choose for mother–child-walks and playing with the child in jungle regions of Bangladesh? Furthermore, it is not clear how this should influence the quality of growing up in the same way for children who still experience and participate in the production contexts of their community, as for children who grow up in urban conditions and who can only obtain their corresponding knowledge from sources specially organized for children. After all, one could still expect a remnant of “life teaches the man” in many regions of these three countries.

Finally, the global export of the notion that children should be nurtured and stimulated intensively and beyond their participation in everyday life tacitly assumes the universality of the intergenerational relations of contemporary Western societies. In these relations children are the product of the intense care of their parents. Child care is at the center of family life and takes up a substantial share of the family’s material and non-material resources. Ariès (1962) has described the transformation of the family as a process that began in Europe at the beginning of the modern era: from the family life of earlier times oriented toward subsistence or social position and wealth to the intimate family centered around care for children. The historiography of private life has traced this process very carefully for the 18th and 19th centuries (Ariès and Duby 1993/1994). In this new relationship of the age groups, the children only have the obligation to accept the investments of the adults, they have to represent the fertile ground on which the parental efforts fall. To develop well thanks to all the parental efforts is their only duty they owe to the family. We can call this an investment model or ‘transmission model’, transmission of parental resources to their offspring. What remains unnoticed in the global export of this transmission model is that for many societies, and probably for the majority of children, the relations between the age groups are not of this kind at all. Rather, at the heart of these relationships is indebtedness of the younger generation to the family, respect and attention to parents and older relatives in general, also referred to as “filial piety”, which is a lifelong commitment (Cole and Durham 2007). This may include a considerable amount of work to which children already have to contribute: in and around the house and maybe in family businesses or other economic contexts (Coppens et al. 2018). Obligation of the young generation toward the old one structures family life, but also the public encounters between the generations.

Ideally, then, two types of intergenerational relations and obligations can be distinguished, each of which embeds different types of childhoods (Bühler-Niederberger 2021). The first type can be called “independent order” – since here an independent adult life of the offspring is aimed at. The second type can be called “interdependent order” – since parents and children (should) remain strongly committed to each other throughout life. In reality, variations and hybrid forms of order – especially under conditions of mass migration – are common (Bühler-Niederberger 2021). With the second model, the conditions in most countries of Asia and Africa, and in large parts of the population of Latin America, can be captured in essential aspects. Some of the requirements have changed somewhat in modern Asian countries and under conditions of migration, most notably the intergenerational relations have been democratized, however, without losing fundamental and lifelong importance of the filial obligation (Sharma and Kemp 2012; Qi 2015). In both models, then, the relations among age groups can be understood as arranged around these two normative cores of either ‘good childhood’ or of ‘filial piety’. Thus, the relationships between adult children and their parents are also of a different nature: Children in the first model can often count on substantial allowances from their parents until middle adulthood, for long educations and precarious entry into the workforce (Arber and Attias-Donfut 2000). Conversely, in the second model, adult children are obliged to make economic contributions and provide care for their parents, even where the parents are not yet needy or infirm. In the second model it is also expected that at least one of the adult children resides with his or her own family in the parental household. The respective state regulations are also based on these private obligations. In countries where the first model prevails, state allowances, pension systems and care for elderly people are usually provided. Meanwhile states in which the second model is predominant may even inscribe filial piety into their constitutions while public old-age care can be decidedly inadequate (Bühler-Niederberger 2020c).

By no means should the distinction between the two models be understood as a distinction between phases of a historical development or phases of (uniform) modernization: Both constellations of distribution rules and practices ideally distinguished here have their own history and – as far as can be foreseen at present – also their own future. However, the validity of the model of ‘filial piety’ is now being undermined when the model of ‘good childhood’ is taken for granted worldwide, which is currently happening above all in the context of debates and programs on education and international development. This does not only set a Western model as universally valid, but also eliminates a resource that could effectively promote educational success, especially in populations that can hardly meet the demands of a ‘good childhood’. The obligation that children feel for their parents and families in the interdependent model is, in fact, likely to foster a very high motivation to succeed. Because children feel an obligation to thank their parents now and in future, and to offer something in return, they have high expectations of themselves. This is shown by studies in very different countries such as Sierra Leone (Devine et al. 2021), Kyrgyzstan (Bühler-Niederberger 2020b), Burkina Faso (Danic 2020) or among children of rural migrants in China (Gu 2021). According to all these studies, children from poor families develop very high educational aspirations and strong achievement motivation not only despite but precisely because their families are poor. They perceive themselves as the ones who could find the way out of poverty for the whole family through their educational success. While these studies took a case-study and qualitative approach, a corresponding question in the PISA study also confirms – now in a quantitative approach – the comparatively higher aspirations of adolescents from countries where ‘filial piety’ is important (OECD 2015, p. 106). In contrast, the PISA study finds that the ambitions of children from countries where we can assume a particularly high validity of the ‘good childhood’ pattern, such as Scandinavian countries or Germany, Switzerland, Austria, are particularly low.

The special resource of the interdependent model of age-group relations thus lies in what we might call a ‘indebtedness capital’ activated by the children themselves. In the study of Chinese children of rural migrants, Gu (2021, p. 509) speaks of “indebtedness” and the emotional work on themselves that children do in order to live up to this obligation they feel. Such a resource can also be assumed to be important where immigrant children from Asian countries achieve particularly high levels of ambition and success in the educational systems of the countries of immigration – significantly higher than autochthonous children of comparable social status. This has been shown repeatedly for children of Vietnamese parents in Germany (El-Mafaalani and Kemper 2017; Nauck et al. 2017) or children of East Asian parents in the US (Hsin and Yu 2014; Liu and Yu 2016). Evidently, their parents do not follow the model of ‘good childhood’ and invest comparatively few resources in supporting their children (Nauck et al. 2017). Kang et al. (2010) examined these educational practices from the perspectives of young adults of Asian descent in the U.S. These young adults clearly criticized their parents and had meanwhile adopted an ideal of ‘good childhood’, of a childhood as they observed it for their American schoolmates, and they had the expectation that ‘good parents’ should foster the individual talents and inclinations of their children. While being young adults, however, they were somewhat more benevolent judging their parents, since they had nevertheless achieved considerable success through the relationship of obligation in which they stood to their parents.

4 Persistent and New Inequality or Questioning the All Too Self-Evident Intergenerational Relations

The model of the ‘good childhood’ and the intergenerational relationships associated with it have become an absolute matter of course in Western countries and for many experts. A seamless alliance between experts and the middle classes made this pattern the basis of educational success for middle-class children. However, it is striking how much ‘good childhood’ is a core element of social inequality. If one contrasts this with a model of childhood from non-Western countries, which goes hand in hand with the intergenerational relationship of ‘filial piety’, we find that the latter may promise success to children – and their families – as well and especially when resources are scarce.

In academia and especially in policy-related discourses, however, the model of ‘good childhood’ is seen as the foundation of human development par excellence and its characteristics are accordingly captured in theoretical models and terms that conceive of children as the results of parental investment. Strictly speaking, when criticism is levelled at this pattern in current debates, it is more a matter of radicalizing the pattern than of breaking it. Childhood must be democratized, and children must be given more opportunities to have a say and to help shape the world, are some of the demands. But adults are also held accountable for these new qualities, as they must create, accompany and evaluate the corresponding learning fields. The fundamental generational relationship of one-sided transmission is hardly up for debate.

If childhood studies question the Western influence on adult–child relations they mostly do so by referring to contrasting childhoods that take place in poor countries and at the margins of society. These are childhoods in which parents are short of any resources and sometimes even absent in children’s lives. However, we find patterns of childhood in which parents are definitely interested in the social integration and success of their children but in which the relations between children and adults definitely do not correspond to a transmission model. These are childhoods which are structured entirely different but turn out to be successful. Such patterns have been pointed out here: the childhoods in Asian middle-income countries or among Asian diaspora groups in Europe or the U.S. More such examples might be found. As a historical example of such a childhood pattern, one can point to the education of the nobility in modern time. In this contribution I have presented the example of the 13-year-old soldier who became soon an officer and later a general; of course, here, too, the parents were interested in having a worthy offspring.

If the worldwide diffusion of ‘good childhood’ with its one-sided intergenerational relations which is so fundamentally linked to social inequality is still to be prevented, it would be important to empirically analyze the multitude and diversity of intergenerational relations in more detail. Which models are practiced, under which conditions, with which assessment by the participants and with which chances and for whom to participate in society on their basis? The point is not to propagate any model as superior or to transfer it unseen to another context, but first of all to recognize and respect the chances and limits of all these different intergenerational relations.