Demografía de la infancia en España: Los niños como unidad de observación

Abstract

Childhood as a social group is usually hidden in demographic and social statistics behind other social categories as family or school. To give visibility to this group, according to the recent approaches of the Sociology of Childhood, it is necessary to consider childhood as a unit of analysis and children as a unit of observation, what implies to observe and to obtain information from reality taking children as a reference. In this article, this perspective is taken to explore some of the basic demographic variables of Spanish childhood from census data. First, there is a description of the population of Spanish children in the last century, comparing this population group with others and placing Spain in the European context. Secondly, the composition of the children’s families in the year 2001 is analysed and the results are interpreted with a view to the changes happened in Spanish households and families throughout the last decades.