DEFINITIONS - UNDERSTANDING Childhood

In most of the history and for most children around the world, childhood they experienced far from ideal. What they get is not a condition that is fully diwamai affection, protection, and all things fun. Many children who must fend for themselves to sustain life in the midst of a hostile conditions (see Scheper-Hughes research results, 1987). Realizing this, the UN convention on the rights of children in 1976 did not install the ideal standard that is too grandiose, but merely the extent to which improvements can be realized with respect to the rights of children dalarn terms of economic, social and cultural. Overview of childhood ideal was varied, both historically and culturally. Philippe Aries (1962 [19 601) said the importance of childhood in Europe only realized in the early 13th century. Previous childhood was not regarded as something special, and the same with the next period in one's life. Conception of childhood was just experiencing a radical change (so close to the current conception) in the 17th century with the rise of modern ideas about families and schools. The shift again occurred in the 19th century. Even then the modern world "obsessed by problems of physical, moral and sexual abuse of children" (Aries 1962119601: 411) If Aries is true, then is not if it happened to most of the theorists menoniol in the history of psychology such as Sigmund Freud and Jean Piaget devoted his attention to understand children and the process of human development into adulthood. Freud focused on the identification and development of awareness of child sexual. A child become moral beings through guilt control of sexual impulses and aggressive. Piaget (see his work in 1926 and 1935) devoted his life to understand children in cognitively construct the various concepts of human involvement in the surrounding world, and also how they understand the numbers, time, physical causality, measurement and so forth. The behavioral psychologist tries to reveal how the children, like animals, "conditioned" to behave in such a manner towards the environment, including other people, which led to reward and punishment. Kian advance the study of animal behavior and the study of human cognitive abilities are supported by an increasingly sophisticated knowledge of biology has revealed many weaknesses learning theory (learning theory) which was originally adopted. But the idea that children were "conditioned" by the environment still embraced by sociologists and anthropologists who over saw the children as part of society and not highlight them as "individuals. For example, anthropologist Margaret Mead, who is known thanks to his work on childhood and adulthood in Samoa before, noted the existence of cultural conditioning that will determine what and how culture is learned by children. Meanwhile, the theorists of "culture and personality" is more interested in using psychoanalytic theory to understand the behavior of children in Indo-gai cultural context (see eg Whiting and Child, 1953) Spread of Piaget's ideas to America and the increasing dominance of the cognitive approach in psychology during the decade of the 1960s and 1970s to strengthen the idea that children are always conditioned by the environment, or more radically, they merely mimic the behavior of adults. This is what led to the theories of socialization, "which states that children are actively involved in the process of understanding in accordance with what vana dioahami by adults. Piaget himself actually condemned by colleagues from Russia, Vygotsky, over its failure to integrate the historical parameters (socio-cultural) and social interaction in his study on children's cognition (eg Iihat Vygotsky, 1962 [1934J), so he missed seeing the extent of the facts cognitive abilities of children at an early age (Iihat also eg Smith et al, 1988), and failed also to understand how the baby is aware of himself when interacting with others (see eg Stern, 1985). Psychological models of childhood, especially emphasizing the active and transformative nature of the process of cognitive development so that the models tend to assume that the outcome of cognition is unknown. In anthropology and sociology, the child is considered as passive recipients of adult ideas. But since the 1980's began nnuncul interdisciplinary approaches in an effort to understanding these childhood. These studies emphasize the concept of children as agents or as producers as well as the product of a dynamic collective process that we call "history" (see for example, Kessel and Siegel, 1983; James and Prout, 1992). In fact the child is always different from their parents and that means they are actually also able to create new forms of social relationship itself that is a manifestation of cultural continuity and cultural change as well. That is, other than to receive, they also create their own values. This approach focuses on how the child, the child's cognitive construct concepts that refer to the previous domain we consider the affairs of adults only, ie starting from the domain of kinship, economics, politics, to religion (eg iihat Toren, 1990). Starting from the new theoretical approaches, the study of childhood in anthropology and sociology has shifted, and the same is happening in the field of psychology.