Forming ourself and Flowing. An interpretative model of children’s agency in everyday life

The article focuses the analysis on the different children and adolescents styles of agency in the flow of life: “rational control”, “traditional control”, “charismatic coping”, “attempts to be Centered and Open”, “on being at the mercy of…”.We are always dealing with two forces (Simmel 1908): a centripetal one, which brings forms to gather – which might otherwise be called certainty, stability, order or even structure. Then there is a centrifugal force that is the typical flow of life. On the contrary the concept of uncertainty reflects the regret of mankind’s titanic effort (the western world’s in particular) to avoid dealing with whatever flows out of predictability, which therefore creates uncertainty. The data come from a wider (about different aspects of agency some of which are treated here) longitudinal research: the same 38 children (then turned adolescents), belonging to two different social backgrounds, and their parents and teachers have been interviewed four times (in 2005, 2008, 2009, 2013).