Developing Tastes: The Aesthetics of Childhood
By Prof. Kate Moran
I’m hoping to start work on a larger project that investigates the aesthetics of childhood. The motivating observation for this project is that the aesthetics of childhood – understood broadly to include literature and film, but also food, clothing and design more generally – often has less to do with expressing oneself, and more to do with shaping and becoming a mature person.
I was inspired to think about this topic while writing my book on philosophy and clothing, which will be published this summer with Cambridge University Press. One chapter in that book focuses on children’s clothing, since Enlightenment philosophers like Rousseau, Kant, and Locke are often cited as influences on the development of children’s clothing in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
That research led me to think about the ways that caretakers’ choices regarding children’s clothing are a part of shaping children’s identity – in more and less innocuous ways. The distinction between expressing oneself through aesthetic choices (as in the case of adults) and shaping oneself (as in the case of children) shouldn’t be overstated, of course. Even very young children make aesthetic choices that are arguably expressive of their identity or tastes: food choices obviously come to mind here, but so do choices regarding clothing, toys, etc. (I have a friend who insisted on wearing purple snow boots year-round as a toddler.)
And adults often make aesthetic choices based on a desire to shape themselves or ‘expand their horizons,’ as when they try a new recipe or visit a museum they might otherwise have ignored. Still, I think a clear enough distinction exists. Further, it is noteworthy that in the case of children, there is typically somebody else making these choices on the child’s behalf.
This leads naturally to a set of ethical questions: caretakers cannot avoid making such choices, in many cases, but they are potentially fraught, since they potentially influence the person the child will become. I am just at the outset of this project, though I have thought a good deal about some of the issues raised here through the lens of clothing.
It would be exciting to eventually turn these ideas into a book-length project. Potential chapters of a larger project might include discussions of children’s literature, food, clothing, design (toys and furniture), and questions surrounding gender. Though it is not the primary motivation for the project, I can imagine that the project would touch on some contemporary debates, for example those surrounding the banning of books in schools and public libraries, and about children who do not identify with the gender assigned to them at birth.