Changing childhoods: Javanese village children in three generations

This paper explores changes in rural Javanese childhoods over three generations. A combination of historical ethnography and comparison of children's time-budgets, based on three periods of field research, allows us to trace how the experience of childhood has changed in the Javanese village of Kali Loro, from the 1930s to the early twenty-first century. We pay particular attention to the ongoing process of prolongation of childhood and adolescence through changes in education, marriage, children's work and young lifestyles. For the grandparents and parents of today's children, working, and earning money, outside school hours was a part of normal life for both boys and girls. While children's need for money has grown with changing lifestyles in the intervening decades, work outside the home, and particularly work that earns money, is no longer a significant part of childrens' experience. This puts today's children in a condition of greater dependence on parents, elder siblings or other relatives for access to cash, bringing new tensions into intergenerational relations.

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