Dictionary

childism en · NOUN

Etymology

From child + -ism.

Meanings

1. (countable, uncountable) Responding to children's particular lived experiences
   • If nothing else, a project in childism would ask those who study ethics to reflect on whether they are considering the challenge of childhood. 2012, Marcia J. Bunge, Children, Adults, and Shared Responsibilities, →ISBN, page 137:
   • Using an approach that I call 'childism', which I will say more about below, I wish to look not at how conceptions of play may be applied to children, but instead at how the experiences of children may be applied to conceptions of play. 2013, John Wall, “2 All the world's a stage”, in The Philosophy of Play:
   • The article examines the kind of resistance children and youth can meet when participating in democratic processes, with examples of speech acts from the Gothenburg Youth Council. It also discusses the theoretic concept of childism (Wall, 2008, 2010) and how childism can be a way to escape the dominance of adulthood norms. 2017, “A Political space for children? The age order and children's right to participation”, in Social Inclusion, volume 5, number 3Jeanette Sundhall:
   • Twain and Salinger's common genius, Heiserman and Miller suggest, lay in their masterful use of a colloquial American adolescent's voice to convey their respective "childism," by which they mean the nostalgic wish to recover our inner Adamic child. 2005, Leerom Medovoi, Rebels: Youth and the Cold War Origins of Identity, →ISBN, page 75:
   • He rightly suggests that “the story of childhood cannot be told in one-dimensional formulas of either innocence and vulnerability or unruliness and undevelopment” (7), but instead require a new paradigm for ethics: “childism.” 2012 Spring/Summer, David Cloutier, “Ethics in Light of Childhood (review)”, in Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics, volume 32, number 1:
2. (countable, uncountable) Empowering children as an oppressed group
3. (countable, uncountable) Prejudice and/or discrimination against the young.
4. (countable) A child-like insight or behavior made by an adult
   • Apart from categorizing her clients' childisms through the several case histories in her book, Young-Bruehl also applies her schema to the Child Savers of the late nineteenth century in order to highlight the transhistorical nature of this kind of treatment ... 2016, “Disciplining Children in Toronto Playgrounds in the Early Twentieth CenturyAnn Marie F. Murnaghan”, in Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures:
   • About the same time I was working on my life is a circle theory, I was also working on a childism that could define human behavior and explain why people behave the way they do and predict their behavior. 2003, Joseph Assante, Wisdom of a Lifetime: Things I Would Want You to Know If I Died Tomorrow, →ISBN, page 34:
   • . Some of these childisms are: (1) “Thimble-drinker … He lived in a cara-van. Dum dum.” All of these childisms originate in childhood incidents ... 2017 May, Lorna Martens, “Mood, Voice, and the Question of the Narrator in Third-Person Fiction”, in Narrative, volume 25, number 2:

Forms