We are faced with two competing ways of viewing childhood. On the one hand, childhood is seen as a sort of unchanging, universal social order experienced in a similar fashion by children around the world and over time. On the other hand, social anthropologists, historians, and others have increasingly come to accept that childhood is socially constructed and hence variable according to the context in which it is lived. This chapter considers, first, competing ways of viewing childhood and children. It then presents an ethnographic account of what I argue are the two dominant ways of experiencing childhood in Northeast Brazil: nurtured childhood and nurturing childhood, as I call them.

The British journalist Anthony Swift wrote a booklet for UNICEF entitled Brazil: The Fight for Childhood in the City (1991a). In it one reads not about the struggles of millions of children in the favelas and rural settlements across Brazil, but about the plight of the comparatively tiny number living in the street.