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Having completed research on the history of children’s literature and published the History of Children’s Literature in Iran series, the Institute’s researchers and specialists have set a new approach for its plans and activities. This new approach goes beyond children’s literature and undertakes comprehensive research on children’s lives and culture from antiquity to 1357 SH.
Childhood studies is a young field whose foundations were laid in the social sciences and sociology over recent decades, and it is now taught through advanced levels at some university and research centers in developed countries.
The Childhood Studies research project covers topics such as the history of children’s health, hygiene, and medicine; education; clothing and everyday tools; toys, pastimes, and games; child-rearing customs and family traditions; and children’s rights.
Having completed research on the history of children’s literature and published the History of Children’s Literature in Iran series, the Institute’s researchers and specialists have set a new approach for its plans and activities. This new approach goes beyond children’s literature and undertakes comprehensive research on children’s lives and culture from antiquity to 1357 SH. The Childhood Studies research project covers topics such as the history of children’s health, hygiene, and medicine; education; clothing and everyday tools; toys, pastimes, and games; child-rearing customs and family traditions; and children’s rights. While gathering wide-ranging data on various childhood-studies topics, Institute researchers began focused, intensive inquiry in Esfand 1388 SH on the first part of this large project: “The History of Children’s Health, Hygiene, and Medicine.”
The background of childhood studies in a society such as Iran is tied directly to knowledge published on the subject in Persian or available online. What portion or level of that vast background does what has been published in Persian on childhood studies actually represent? Setting aside the ten-volume History of Children’s Literature in Iran—a foundational study and an inseparable part of understanding childhood in our cultural setting—how many other independent research works truly fit this theoretical frame? Our entire holdings, without judging content quality, barely reach the fingers of two hands. What remains are a few book titles and a small number of scattered articles, a notable share of which also suffer from translation slips, terminological confusion, and linguistic weakness in conveying meaning. With such knowledge, our cultural community can never claim to have properly grasped this multidisciplinary, newly founded field or to be ready to advance it scientifically.
Theorizing childhood in the West has a continuous, multidisciplinary, structured history that follows a logical chain. The path began with transformative historical research—especially Philippe Ariès’s pioneering and controversial 1960s work Centuries of Childhood, which first showed that childhood is not a purely natural or biological phenomenon but a social and historical construct that did not exist in its modern form in earlier periods. Later historians such as Linda Pollock challenged that view and showed that affection for children has older roots, yet those debates prepared the ground for larger shifts. In later decades, childhood studies grew by drawing on philosophers such as Michel Foucault on institutions, power, and discipline, and on sociological theories of the family and the school.
The peak of this transformation appeared in the late 1980s and the 1990s, when sociologists and anthropologists such as Allison James, Chris Jenks, Alan Prout, and Jens Qvortrup laid the theoretical framework known as the new sociology of childhood. In that framework the child is no longer only a powerless, passive being in the process of socialization who must be prepared for adult life, but is seen as an active agent who helps make meaning and culture and even shape family and social currents. Adoption of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1989, with its stress on participation and the child’s right to be heard, also became the legal complement to this intellectual wave. Later the field linked to postcolonial theory, geographies of childhood, and critical studies to show that the lived experience of children across classes, races, and regions is never uniform.
Our great harm is that whenever the Persian-speaking community turns to glean from this vast body of knowledge, it picks and translates a few grains from the harvest at random, without order or balance. A text from the new sociology is translated without grasping its prior historiography, or an article on child agency reaches the researcher without the background of critiques of structuralism. This piecemeal selection, instead of clarifying seekers’ intellectual horizon, traps them in a tangle of unconnected terms.
For us researchers at the Institute for Research on the History of Children’s Literature who focus on this subject, how is the key point and purpose of engaging this specialized knowledge defined? Do we only want to repeat the terms of Western theories and schools, or is our intent—using their methodological tools and theoretical frameworks—to know the background, changes, and real condition of childhood in Iranian society and within Iranian culture and civilization from prehistory to today? Without doubt, if our aim is not to understand the lived world of the Iranian child and the historical course of how “the child” has been conceived in Iranian culture and civilization, dealing with these theories will remain empty words. So a systematic rereading of childhood studies—both what has been translated into Persian so far and original texts in the Latin language family—is an effort to link local experience consciously to this knowledge’s global chain, and thereby, by adding a new link, to help researchers seeking a deeper grasp of the history, culture, and varied expressions of children’s lives and childhood in Iran.