Toward the Construction of Ghanaian Childhood(s): An Exploration of Ghanaian Children’s Perception of Ideal Childhood.

Children’s lives and how they live are mostly laid out for them with very little consideration to their own choices or interests. Most often, the rational is that they are young, inexperienced and vulnerable. A lot of policies are put in place to ensure that children have satisfactory lives. However, all these are done with little consideration to what exactly children themselves want. Most often, research with children concerning their perceptions of life focus on what they want to be in the future as adults thus, very little literature exists on how they want their lives to be as children. This study helps fill the gap on what children want their lives to be as children with the aim of giving them a voice in issues that concern them. Childhood studies theorize children as active social agents whose perspectives and contributions to both their lives and that of other social actors could be invaluable to the society if they are taken seriously. Therefore, childhood studies are grounded in methods which place greater emphasis on the meanings that children attribute to their lives. There are concerns about how best to make their voices heard by reducing to the barest minimum, adults’ influences on their perceptions. This calls for particular methods that will put children’s views in the fore front of research. To achieve this aim, this study made use of the qualitative reconstructive approach, documentary method, that makes both explicit and implicit meanings form data for analysis. With documentary method, what children say explicitly and how they say it are analyzed to give two levels of meaning with the implicit meaning being knowledge that they are not aware they possess. To achieve the aims of this study, narrative essays about children’s fantasy of ideal childhood were collected from 47 children who are between 10 and 13 years old in the Winneba Municipality in Ghana. The documentary method provided evidence that, in their fantasy of ideal childhood, children focus on certain key activities and relationships as fundamental issues. In addition, five orientation frameworks were reconstructed from their implicit knowledge as constructions of Ghanaian childhoods. These orientation frameworks emphasize theories of diversity of childhoods even within the same locality. Finally, the documentary method is recommended as a very effective method for research with children.