The Missing Child in Canadian Sociology: Is It Time for Change?

Abstract

The Missing Child in Canadian Sociology:Is It Time for Change? Patrizia Albanese (bio) Introduction A few years back, I organized a session, titled "Where Has the Sociology of Childhood Gone?" at the annual meeting of the Canadian Sociology Association at the Congress for the Humanities and Social Sciences. This session yielded a great deal of interest from "sociology of youth" researchers, but papers on children and childhood were almost non-existent. I organized the session out of frustration, after having taught a sociology of childhood course for a number of years at Ryerson University in Toronto. Each year, when publishers' representatives came around to sell course texts, there was not a single Canadian sociology of childhood textbook to be found. They nonetheless insisted on sending me psychology textbooks on child development. I watched my psychology collection grow over the years, as my sociology of childhood shelf lay bare. I contemplated writing my own Canadian textbook, but few publishers were interested because they believed there was too small a market, and they were correct. I scanned sociology-department websites from across the country and found few stand-alone courses on children. There were plenty on the sociology of youth, families, violence, poverty, social problems/issues, and the life-course and aging. All of these somewhat indirectly, potentially, included children, but few sociology departments actually committed an entire course to children. Introduc…