The sociology of childhood is currently at a crossroads for developing research agendas beyond the ‘new’ social studies of childhood of the 1980s and 1990s, which suffer from four problems: cultural relativism derived from binary conceptualizations of childhood, Northern normativity that ill-fits Southern realities, methodological issues related to the preferred child-centric and participatory research, and disengagement from mainstream sociological theories. In this article, based on a relational conceptualization of value, the author calls for a value turn that could open childhood theorization both to new forms of cultural analysis of social processes at the familial, national, and global scales, and to new forms of applied research on policy fronts such as childcare and education policies, civil society engagement, and parenting. Focusing on the value of children bridges the gap between childhood sociology and mainstream sociological theories. It also allows for thinking across analytical scales and methodological approaches, and decentralizes knowledge production about childhood from the discipline’s Euromerican-centric traditions.

儿童期的社会学目前正处于发展研究议程的十字路口，其发展超出了1980年代和1990年代的“新”儿童期社会研究，这受到四个问题的困扰：源自儿童期二元概念的文化相对论，不适用于南方的北方规范性现实，与首选的以儿童为中心和参与性研究相关的方法论问题，以及与主流社会学理论的脱节。在本文中，基于价值的关系概念化，作者呼吁实现价值转向，这可能会开启童年理论的发展，既适用于家庭，国家和全球范围内对社会进程进行文化分析的新形式，也适用于新的应用形式。研究政策方面，例如育儿和教育政策，公民社会参与和育儿。关注儿童的价值弥合了童年社会学和主流社会学理论之间的鸿沟。它还允许跨分析尺度和方法论方法进行思考，并从该学科以欧洲为中心的传统中分散有关童年的知识生产。