How Do Children and Their Mothers Make Sense of Photographs Containing Other Children?

Abstract

This inquiry is grounded in the idea that parent-child activities are central to the cultural development of society. To address this larger theoretical premise, I examine parents’ and children’s sense making of photographs of childhood. Photographing itself, as a process, replicates representations of childhood that precede the practice while explicitly reproducing and transforming the existing meanings attributed to the medium in which the photograph is displayed. Therefore, I consider photographing to be a cultural activity that helps people share, make sense of, and transform historical, personal, and societal experience and knowledge. The cultural-historical school of developmental psychology has been close to childhood studies in its recognition that child and society interact to create meaning and human development (Daiute, 2013; Vygotsky, 1978). Dynamic developmental theory (Daiute, 2014) is important to emphasize here, in part to provide a focused study of child-adult interaction with uses of digital photography in the development of society. Dynamic developmental theory values collaboration between individuals and their surroundings and accepts everyone, including children, as active participants of their social environment, both as individuals and as members of a cultural group. Another major tenet of this contemporary developmental theory is the role of symbol systems, like language, rituals, and icons, as cultural creations that people use to mediate their interactions in societies and the meanings of life. Consistent with this view, parents use digital photography to create social environments and cultural messages for making sense of their environments, making their own choices and acting at this technological moment in time. In that dynamic transformation, not only the ways we relate to children and childhoods change. The ways we express our relationships also go through rapid evolution due to the technologies we use to manifest our experiences. For example, taking family photographs every Christmas morning after breakfast may become a tradition in a household. By helping form this tradition, parents can structure, in everyday activity and discourse, the use of media in which children participate. Photography, in this example, is a particular form of media. It has its own type of communication in visual mode that developed over time. The output of this communication could be shared in any form (e.g., on a Christmas card, on Instagram, in a frame in a living room) based on the photographer’s purpose. The structure the photographer uses has its own history, stylistic criteria, affordances, and constraints, yet the reason for taking the photograph and the myriad details involved are all Photographing is a cultural activity that helps people share, make sense of, and transform historical, personal, and societal experience and knowledge. The widespread practice of parents’ photographing and posting photos of their children inspired this study. The study asks: How do mothers and children use photographs of children to make sense of childhood? The research included an activity where children (ages 7–10) and their mothers narrated stories using two photos of children. Children and mothers emphasized some shared and importantly different values. Values that differ in emphasis across participants reflect their different positions in everyday life or conflicting perspectives.