Learning to Listen: Exploring the Idioms of Childhood

How do we recognise children’s participation and their relationships with public life? Drawing on evidence from ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2014 and 2016 for the ERC funded Connectors Study on the relationship between childhood and public life, this article explores the ways in which children communicate their encounters with public life. The contemporary phenomenon of listening without hearing is discussed as this relates to the call for listening to children and the simultaneous failure to hear what they say. Idioms are introduced as an ‘instrument’ for thinking through what it means and feels like to encounter and make sense of childhood and children’s practices of relating to public life. The analysis focuses on three emblematic encounters with six- to eight-year-old children living in Athens, Hyderabad, and London. We argue that dominant understandings of listening to children rely heavily on cognitive, conceptual, and rational models of idealised and largely verbal forms of communication that ignore the affective, embodied, and lived dimensions of making meaning. Through ethnographic thick description, we trouble what it means to tune into children’s worlds and to ‘properly hear’, and in doing so demonstrate the ways in which idioms support an understanding of what matters to children.