Has the Posiition of Child Hood Has Improved

The position of children in society has improved
‘Childhood’ is a social construct. This means that it is different depending on the period of history that you look at or the place. Sociologists argue whether ‘childhood’ has improved or has got worse and use theories and evidence to prove this .There are to two sides to the argument and phrases used by sociologists to describe that either childhood has improved   ‘The march of progress ‘ , or been made worse ‘ Conflict view’.
‘March of progress ‘argues that childhood has become better over time. One sociologist who agrees there has been a march of progress is Aries. Aries used painting s of past eras to compare childhood then, to current childhood. He found that children were dressed as many adults, doing adult jobs, playing with adult toys. This for Aries was evidence that childhood has progressed as these days there is a clear distinction between adults and children and the treatment and expectations of young people is very different to adults , society is much more child centred now. Another sociologist who backed up the march of progress idea was shorter. Shorter based his conclusion on infant mortality rates (IMR). He said that as the years have gone on fewer children have been dying, this is due to advances in health care, diet etc. and this has caused parent to be more loving and caring to towards their children. This therefore shows that there has been significant progress in regards to ‘childhood’.
However some may argue that childhood is worse now that it has ever been. This view is given the name ‘conflict view’, this says that the march of progress is a idealistic view of childhood and ignores basic inequalities in everyday society for children .There are different groups of people that support this view .One of the groups of people is feminists. One argument a feminist might agree with is the research of Hillman .Hillman researched into gender inequalities in childhood and found out that in...