“I’d keep them tidy”: domesticity, work and nostalgia in girls’ imagined futures described in essays written by 11-year-olds in 1969

Abstract

Children’s creative writing about ‘the imagined future’ potentially provides insights into their understandings of adult work roles and family relationships, their views of gender roles, and the ways in which social inequalities are reproduced over time. This chapter analyses data from a unique sample of essays written by members of the National Child Development Study (NCDS), the 1958 British birth cohort study, when they were eleven years old in 1969, on the topic of ‘Imagine you are twenty-five…’. It explores girls’ accounts of their imagined future family lives, focusing in particular how they imagined combining paid and domestic work. It aims to highlight children’s writing as a resource for research, and demonstrates that however cursory the task children are asked to undertake, they are creative, constructive and innovative in their responses, and that what they create may tell us something about their current circumstances and social context, and about their capacity for keen, perceptive observation. However, the chapter also urges caution and suggests that we need to retain a critical stance towards the utility of asking children to predict their futures.