Jami SpencerEnglish 401Final PaperRated “E” For EveryoneWhile children’s literature is one of the youngest subdisciplines of English Studies, there is already talk of its limits, shortcomings, and the subsequent necessity of abroader, more devoted and multi-disciplinary study of children. ‘Children’s Studies’ or ‘Childhood Studies’ is a discipline which is younger still than children’s literature. With its foundation set in 1991, Children’s Studies, much like Women’s Studies and African-American Studies, seeks to give voice to and gain an understanding of a marginalized group under patriarchal dominance.The field of Children’s Studies began at The City University of New York, Brooklyn College, in the Fall of 1991. Gertrud Lenzer, in his introduction to The Lion and the Unicorn’s special issue on Children’s Studies, states that this creation of an interdisciplinary field that is focused on children and childhood was the result of critical, academic, analytical neglect of children. The “corporate sector had been well ahead of the academic disciplines” and capitalized, profited, and expanded by devoting a new and separate market to youth (182). Politically and economically, children were used for money and votes, then discarded, forgotten, and ignored.Aside from overall academic neglect, the need for this new and interdisciplinary field was realized due to the increasing number of “subspecialties” and the “intellectual division of labor in children-related scholarship across the disciplines” that became disconnected (182). The need for a “holistic conceptualization of children as individuals and as a class…and to develop a commensurate and genuinely comprehensive 1perspective on and analysis of children” resulted in the foundation of Children’s Studies at Brooklyn College (183).Throughout its creation and subsequent growth, careful attention has been paid to the idea of the ‘child’ and what that term represents within Children’s Studies. Scholars, researchers, teachers, students, and all involved in the development of this new field haveproceeded with caution when considering the image of the ‘child’ within the field. It is precisely because Children’s Studies is multidisciplinary that such caution is necessary. There is danger of disconnection, misrepresentation, misunderstanding and misinterpretation when so many fields of study come together to focus on the same area of interest. There are plenty of issues of disconnection within the very disciplines themselves, not to mention the many that appear with the attempt to join or cross disciplines.Karen Coats, in her article for the Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, points out such issues from the start. The very name of the field seems to come to question. Coats calls attention to the fact that sociologists such as Lenzer (quoted above) refer to the field as Children’s Studies, but in the humanities, in literature departments, and to Galbraith, Travisano, and Flynn, “childhood” is used instead of “children.” Although these authors will be mentioned later, the disciplinary differences rear their unattractive, conditioned heads early on in this attempt at a field that cuts across disciplinary lines. While one discipline views children as clients, subjects, and thus real live people, the other focuses on the state of childhood as a “sociohistorical construction”(Coats, 140). Coats points out, too, that we do not say “Womanhood Studies” but the 2more inclusive “Women’s Studies” and so settles on the plural and inclusive Children’s Studies (140). The naming of the field may seem a minor detail, but after researching and reading several articles across various disciplines, it is obvious that there is much in a name. While Lenzer’s approach is to examine the collective ‘children’ and in doing so examines their state of ‘childhood,’ I find that Richard Flynn and Mary Galbraith tend to focus solely on the conception of ‘childhood’. What this does is create specialization in very distinct, very different areas. Writers such as Flynn and especially Galbraith seem unwilling to cross those disciplinary lines and almost unconcerned with the individual, thinking, feeling child that comprises the collective children currently and historically existing in the state of childhood. Looking at Lenzer’s definition and explanation of Children’s Studies as established at Brooklyn College, one must conclude that a willingness to travel across the disciplinary border and outside of specified and narrow-minded specialization is an absolute necessity in the field of Children’s Studies. In a fieldthat is genuinely (or at least designed to be) multidisciplinary, an ability and a willingnessto communicate with the Other is vital to the survival of, to the reputation of, and to the well-being, growth, and success of Children’s Studies.As Coats states, scholars in this new and growing field ask philosophical, theoretical, and pragmatic questions and get answers that are “always provisional and experimental, hinging on an ethical and methodological pluralism that must be maintained” (emphasis mine, 140). It is the pluralistic quality, resulting from the interdisciplinarity, that forms the very foundation of what a field focused on the complex,multi-faceted, specificity of children seeks to accomplish. 3Of course, where children are concerned, there will be hot debate, raised hackles, and much controversy. Every parent has his or her own parental strategies and methodologies. Each knows what is right and what works for his or her child (or thinks they do) and each has very specific ideas, many socially constructed, about the best way to raise a child. The fights between parents in little league baseball games or on the basketball court sidelines are nothing compared to what could happen in an academic field that takes parents, grandparents, brothers, sisters, teachers, and people who were once children, each with their own adult, academic, disciplinary methodologies and throws them all together in an attempt to reach a “holistic understanding of children” (Lenzer, 183). What is important to Lenzer in terms of Children’s Studies, is that children are notreduced to “specialized abstract fragments that then in turn are hypostatized as representing” an ideal of the ‘child’ (183). This is a recognizable