This study examines how preschool girls organize situated board games. Examining video data using an ethnomethodological approach, we focus on moral work-in-interaction in instances where the girls negotiate rule violations. It was found that the girls oriented to diverse forms of moral orders, shifting between a competitive/justice-based order and a socio-moral order of reciprocal relations. Argumentative moves of cheating were used as communicative resources both to control moral transgressions and to gain personal advantages. Overall, the analysis shows that preschool girls are active moral agents in the making and breaking of rules and in the negotiation of complex moral orders.
Children’s rights to asylum have emerged as an urgent political challenge. This article uses a number of cases discussed in Sweden’s largest morning paper to analyse claims of asylum-seeking children and how these claims challenge the normative limits of contemporary asylum, concerning what and who ought to be recognized by law. Even though the universality of the child constitutes a running theme, the arguments and the conception of children underpinning the claims are diverse. The article suggests that the claiming of rights as a socio-political practice could be a vital analytical approach to studying children’s rights and offers a much needed alternative to the dominant mainstreaming paradigm.
This article probes how childhood experiences are actively taken into adult lives and thus challenges the unwitting and unintentional reproduction of an adult–child binary in childhood studies. We do this by analyzing interviews with one adult daughter of immigrants from Mexico to the United States at four points in time (ages 19, 26, 27, and 33). Using narrative analysis to examine the mutability of memory, we consider how Eva oriented herself to her childhood story, what was salient and invisible in each recount, the values she associated with the practice, and the meanings she took from her experiences. We show how Eva re-interpreted her experiences as an immigrant child language broker in relation to unfolding life events, showing her childhood to be very much alive in her adult life. Language brokering serves as one way in which to examine the interpenetration of childhood into adulthood, rather than being the focus per se.
This article examines developmental differences in children’s reasoning about secrecy and lying as well as their use of these behaviors in two studies. Study 1 explored children’s (N = 66, 8–15 years) reasoning about the circumstances in which secrecy and lying are acceptable. Study 2 analyzed children’s (N = 50, 8–15 years) actual reported daily frequency of secrets and lies in relation to maladaptive behavior problems. Overall, findings suggest that children’s motivations for secrecy and lying become more nuanced, and seemingly utilitarian, with age, and that children’s use of concealment may be an adaptive tool that facilitates social relationships.
This study examines how possibilities for agency are designed into online youth counselling services, as well as how such possibilities are addressed by young prospective users during the design of the services. The data are drawn both from the design of a national website for youth clinics in Sweden and from a design project developing e-services for local youth clinics in a Swedish municipality. The agency of young users is here treated as a key concern for understanding how user empowerment is accomplished through the design of websites and e-services. Using combined research materials (i.e. two websites and focus group meetings), this study demonstrates how design features may both facilitate and restrict young people’s involvement and control over sensitive and private issues. In addition, we demonstrate how the designed possibilities for empowerment may allow young users to critically approach and effectively use such services.
The study targets how reported speech is used as an interactional resource for building and legitimatizing a particular version of events in the context of peer disputes. Several unfolding multiparty storytelling events within a group of preadolescent girls in a Swedish school setting are analyzed, primarily highlighting the interactional use of previous talk in building credibility for particular affective and moral stances, as well as blame accusations during disputes. Overall, the study highlights different ways that reported speech can function as a resource for legitimizing negative assessments of opposite parties, building alliances, and taking sanctioning actions toward peers.
Research on children’s friendship in culturally diverse contexts has shown that children are more likely to choose friends from their own ethnic or racial group than others. This article examines this tendency from the perspective of 10- to 12-year-old girls attending ethnically mixed primary schools in Dublin, Ireland. It argues that both the emotional challenges involved in encounters across divides and the dynamics of all children’s friendships have a significant role to play in the manner in which boundaries are drawn.
Education for Sustainability is an internationally recognised field of learning that is currently mandated as a cross-curriculum priority in the Australian curriculum. Empirical research into children’s views about sustainability, and how they develop sustainability knowledge, however, remains limited. This article focuses on research that investigated children’s perspectives of sustainability in Victoria, Australia. The children were recruited through the Sustainable School Expo where they delivered keynote presentations about their school’s respective Education for Sustainability initiatives. Data were generated from interviews with 16 children aged from 9 to 13 years and included a set of self-created and designed sustainability artefacts. The article contends that children have strongly conceptualised ideas about sustainability that are developed through interactions with material entities (human/more than human) in diverse environments. A key finding suggests that children become vital stakeholders in Education for Sustainability through experiential, investigative, sensorial and place-oriented ways of learning, which informs how they build sustainability knowledge.
Minimum wages legislation in the United Kingdom applies to those aged 16 years or older. Evidence is presented that children believe that their wage levels should be ‘fair’. On one hand, such views have emerged from focus groups of working children. On the other, various pressure groups representing young people are seeking to establish fair payment to child workers. It is argued that the government, trade unions and other bodies have failed to adequately address the protection of young workers.
This article investigates children’s participation and sense of belonging from the perspective of unaccompanied children, based on two qualitative research projects with unaccompanied children in Sweden and Finland. The results show that the unaccompanied children’s own understanding of their participation and belonging in different positions was fluid; for instance, the borders between childhood and adulthood, and striving for independence or wanting to be cared for by adults were flexible, allowing the children’s movement within and between the categories.
Along with the growth of child participatory research an increased focus on its complexity, specifically unaddressed power inequities in the research relationship and unreflexive use of methods, has developed. This article discusses a participatory research project with children in Ireland and reflects on attempts to achieve deeper participation through the use of children and youth advisory groups, mixed visual and discursive group methods. It argues that overly paternalistic frameworks adopted by ethical review bodies can hamper participatory research with children.
This article draws on a memory-work project on the childhood experiences and memories of pornography in Finland to argue that the autobiographical younger self used in these reminiscences is a creature distinct from the cultural figure of a child at risk, and that the forms of learning connected to pornography are more diverse and complex than those limited to sexual acts alone. The notion of an asexual child susceptible to media effects remains detached from people’s accounts of their childhood activities, experiences and competences. By analyzing these, it is possible to critically reexamine the hyperbolic concerns over the pornification and sexualization of culture.
This article discusses the life projects of migrant children and young people in England and Spain and illustrates the importance of exploring family dynamics, contextual legal constraints, and ‘transnational uncertainties’ as part of young migrants’ ideas about the future. It reflects on the dilemma posed by acknowledging the agency of migrant children in relation to their future while at the same time considering the constraints they meet as minors and migrants within a broader family and societal context.
Ambiguities and tensions can arise when children are facilitated to act as ‘primary researchers’ concerning whether this is primarily to support their ‘participation’ in knowledge production and, with the knowledge produced, in relevant decision-making processes or whether it is mainly for any educational benefits. This article considers these ambiguities and tensions theoretically and by using evidence from a study where English primary school children were supported to conduct their own research projects. It concludes that, while the boundaries between children’s research as participation and pedagogy can be ambiguous, it should not be promoted for its potential educational benefits alone.
This article explores how children make, manage, or avoid friendships in super-diverse primary school settings. We draw on interviews and pictorial data from 78 children, aged 8–9 years across three local London primary schools to identify particular friendship groupings and the extent to which they followed existing patterns of social division. Children in the study did recognise social and cultural differences, but their friendship perceptions, affections, conflicts and practices meant that the way in which difference impacted relationships was partial and unstable. Friendship practices in the routine settings of school involved interactions across difference, but also entrenchments around similarity.
Drawing on the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the article highlights various conceptions of violence at a Swedish boarding school and is based on a critical discourse analysis of different educational and media documents. The investigation indicates that ambitions to protect children from violence need to overcome the dichotomy of private and public in order to protect children affected by violence in the borderland between the private and public spheres.
This self-reflective article explores the possibilities of producing children’s ‘voice’ in the domestic research context. We look at producing voices as the process of giving an account of children’s meaning making and life. We examine the methodological challenges of producing voices in the home environment from three perspectives: power, trust and ethics. The findings presented in the article are based on an ongoing longitudinal study of Finnish children’s media environments, which began in 2007 and will continue through 2016.
This article looks at examples of young children acting as citizens and aims to illuminate these by utilising Biesta’s exposition of subjectification and socialisation conceptions of citizenship. Specifically, the article applies the concepts of ‘dissensus’, taken from Rancière’s work; ‘agonism’, taken from Mouffe’s work; and solidarity from Levinas’ work to actual ‘scenes’ from Swedish and English early childhood education settings. It also discusses these in relation to other contemporary work on concepts of children’s citizenship and our own theories of young children’s play.
This article interrogates what are frequently taken to be central commitments of Childhood Studies: the idea that children are worthy of study ‘in their own right’, that childhood is a ‘social construction’, that children are and must be treated as active agents, and that participatory methods are the gold standard. It is argued that while these ideas have been fruitful in some respects, they involve fundamental problems.
Violence against children is a human rights problem that cuts across gender, race, geographical, religious, socio-economic status and cultural boundaries. The risk of violence towards disabled children during their lifetime is three to four times greater than towards non-disabled children. It starts in early childhood, is more severe and linked to disablist structures in society. Violence is perpetrated by individuals and through institutional practices that are part of disabled children’s everyday life. Violence is often misdiagnosed as related to individual impairment, and not recognised by professionals or the victims themselves. Presenting disabled women’s reflections of childhood violence, help-seeking and responses to disclosure, this article seeks to raise an awareness of violence towards disabled girls and the need for these to be recognised as a serious child protection issue to be included in official definitions of child abuse.
Concerns about increasing obesity in poorer parts of the world, including India, have often been premised in terms of global shifts in activity levels and caloric consumption. Lifestyle changes have been documented in large cities, but we do not know whether these changes are reaching young people in less urban locations. This study used photo journals to explore children’s perceptions of their food and activity habits in a remote Indian city. Children expressed interest in active pastimes, learning, and health, and indicated traditional, modern, local, and global influences in their lives. Findings offer context for research and interventions.
A large study in Australian schools aimed to elucidate understandings of ‘wellbeing’ and of factors in school life that contribute to it. Students and teachers understood wellbeing primarily, and holistically, in terms of interpersonal relationships, in contrast to policy documents which mainly focused on ‘problem areas’ such as mental health. The study also drew on recognition theory as developed by the social philosopher Axel Honneth. Results indicate that recognition theory may be useful in understanding wellbeing in schools, and that empirical research in schools may give rise to further questions regarding theory.
Drawing on empirical research completed in Belgium, this article presents a comparative analysis of the care regimes for two categories of children: transnational adoptees and unaccompanied minors. Although state immigration policies consider the two groups of minors as humanitarian exceptions that require preferential treatment, the kind of humanitarian help and social investment they are believed to deserve differs dramatically. Ideologies of relational exclusivity and fixed belonging differently structure the investment of care that the two groups are believed to need, dependent on their ability to be read as freestanding, cultureless individuals, assimilable to the host nation.
This article draws on data from an ethnography exploring young children’s interactions in a multi-ethnic school in an urban area in the North of England. It focuses on the ways in which children explore and negotiate their identities against the shifting backdrop of local and global discourses about religion, race, gender and political change. In particular, we explore how children of the Libyan diaspora take up the semiotic resources available to them in their daily negotiations about identity. We show how through their spoken interactions, drawings and writings the children perform identities dialogically, with each other and with adult professionals, talking about salient issues of religious, cultural and national heritage before and during the Libyan Uprising in 2011. Using McFarlane’s concept of ‘translocal assemblages’, we show how discourses and media narratives that circulate among diasporic communities provide a set of resources that children use to make sense of themselves in local contexts.
This article explores the perspectives of Afghan unaccompanied refugee minors on their own motives and aspirations and on the motives and aspirations of their family and community context at the moment they left their home country and at arrival in the host country. Interviews and questionnaires were used to measure the aspirations of 52 Afghan unaccompanied refugee minors, soon after their arrival in Belgium. Aspirations at departure and evolutions in aspirations over time were examined retrospectively. Finding security and studying particularly influenced their decision to migrate. These aspirations changed over time under the impact of a diversity of factors, such as their own experiences and the opinions of others (e.g. peers, smugglers). Since motives and aspirations might influence the migration trajectories of unaccompanied refugee minors, migration policies and practitioners should take them actively into account so as to improve support for unaccompanied refugee minors.
This Research Note, which focuses on Nepal, challenges the way in which donor definitions of inclusive education for students with disabilities and learning difficulties can too easily be imposed upon countries in the South without allowing for a thorough analysis of the disability context of particular countries. It questions the way in which generalisations are often made about how disability is perceived and how disabled people are treated in Nepal without a thorough analysis of the complexity of the actual situation. It also questions the way in which donors often ignore and do not seek to build upon successful local ways of working with people with disabilities. The Research Note does not argue against the positive vision of inclusive education, but does attempt to point out that a top-down donor-led model of inclusion does not always leave space for a thorough study of the reality upon which educational changes must be based.
This article presents a theoretically based narrative analysis of conversations held with six women in South Africa who position themselves as mothers of disabled children. We examine the dominant socio-cultural narratives that impact the lives of the mothers as they enact motherhood, and the counter-narratives that emerge in the process. Three key themes are discussed: struggle, resiliency and agency; motherhood and the intersections of personal histories, spirituality and Ubuntu; and the economics and politics of negotiating access to social benefits, including early intervention and education. The study highlights the contextual, situated and diverse nature of motherhood and the disabled child in contexts of early education and care.
This article explores the challenges related to the inclusion of girls with disabilities in Vietnamese schools. Building on fieldwork which interrogates the institutional treatment of girls with disabilities in the Vietnamese context, we suggest that there is a need to think more critically about the inclusion and exclusion of girls with disabilities within social and educational policies. The issues that we will discuss are taken from a theoretical and methodological standpoint. First, there is a need for rethinking the intersection between disability and gender in educational policies and practices; second, we emphasize the need for understanding the implications of inclusion and exclusion in global/national/local contexts in relation to girls with disabilities; and finally, we suggest that using innovative methodological approaches is important to foster inclusion and social change.
This article is based on material collected in researching the viability of a regional network focused on the inclusion of children with disabilities in education in the Pacific region. It discusses the importance of balancing the international vision of a rights-based approach to education with indigenous inclusive values in the small and scattered Pacific island populations. A case study is analysed of the development of community-based inclusive education in Samoa by a national non-governmental organisation in collaboration with various government ministries, and finally, the potential of networking in generating new, contextually relevant knowledge about inclusive education is debated.
Although a proliferation of participatory studies has explored youth sexuality in the African context, very few studies have included youth with disabilities. This is inevitably a result of the misconceptions surrounding disabled sexualities and youth with disabilities’ competence in undertaking research. This article argues against these misconceptions by outlining a participatory sexuality study that worked with youth with disabilities as co-researchers in South Africa. In discussing the experiences of the young disabled co-researchers, the article troubles the constructs of power and empowerment in youth participatory research.
This article considers how disabled children and young people living in the global south can be included actively in research that explores their lives. While acknowledging the complex, theoretical dilemmas in the overlapping arenas of childhood, disability and international development, the focus here is on methodology. Many researchers argue that children in diverse contexts can be active participants in research and this is increasingly occurring globally. However, this trend towards consulting children themselves is rarely extended to those with disabilities. Arguably, they are accidentally forgotten, assumed to have nothing to say or perceived to be methodologically difficult to include. Thus, disabled children and young people’s perspectives are overlooked, particularly in the global south. We describe two participatory research projects with disabled children and young people in India and Sri Lanka, and focus particularly on practical issues that arose including recruitment, information and consent processes and data collection methods. We argue that considering these issues and making the necessary adaptations to enable children with a variety of impairments to participate meaningfully contributes to enacting both the relevant United Nations conventions, the 1989 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child and the 2006 United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. Advocating their participation without making appropriate provisions is potentially tokenistic and unethical. It is necessary and possible to include them both in ‘mainstream’ child-focussed research, and specific disability-orientated projects. Involving disabled children in research has dual purposes: inclusion of their perspectives alongside those of other children and highlighting their disability-specific views where relevant. What they say may be surprising to some and challenge assumptions about them. Importantly, this will contribute to reducing their marginalisation from mainstream society.
This article describes the strategies employed by caregivers in accessing the right to education for their children with disabilities in Orange Farm, Gauteng. Children with disabilities are one of South Africa’s most vulnerable population groups. Despite enabling legal and policy reform, children with disabilities face unconstitutional attitudinal and environmental barriers to accessing the nonprogressive right to a basic education. This case study examines the caregivers’ self-efficacy, agency and the opportunity structures within which they are operating using an interdisciplinary theoretical framework and a qualitative methodology. The article will provide detailed examples of the agentic strategies that caregivers devise, in the face of hostile and unaccommodating bureaucratic institutions, disjointed referral mechanisms, discriminatory norms, stigmatising discourses and unjust power relations.
Current policies aimed at children with disabilities in Ladakh, India, focus on the delivery of educational services to the individual child. Ethnographic research conducted with children with cognitive disabilities and their families in this rural Himalayan region reveals why this approach is problematic, given the local cultural context. Critique centers on the mismatch between inclusive education’s emphasis on the individual child and the cultural context in which the family is crucial to a child’s well-being and inclusion. In Ladakh, families – not children alone – experience and navigate the social, biological, and financial repercussions of disability and should thus be the focus of "inclusive" interventions.
The number of schools for children aged between 4 and 36 months has increased greatly in Spain over the last 20 years, and with that children’s experiences have also changed. The aim of this research is to examine child culture and the factors influencing the relationships that children establish with peers in formal spaces with specific characteristics. According to the results, seniority and playing style influence friendship preferences, along with organisational factors such as the type and number of toys and age structure. This ethnographic research was conducted in the city of Barcelona.
Camping is an important activity for many New Zealand families, with half reporting to be regular campers or intending to camp. We explore the role of camping in the lives of 69 families undertaking this activity at five campgrounds over summer in the South Island of New Zealand. We argue that campgrounds are places that encourage children’s freedom, sense of adventure and experience of outdoor activities. The social capital evident in campgrounds enables families to adopt a less pressured and ‘hands-off’ parenting style which acts as an antidote to the pressured safety consciousness that prevails in their usual daily lives.
Childhood is socially constructed, and constructions influence perceptions of appropriate work for young people. This article investigates New Zealand parents’ perspectives on young people’s involvement in paid work. The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, 1989, and the International Labour Organisation C138 Minimum Age Convention, 1973, intended to protect young people, embody constructions of them as vulnerable. We argue that policymakers should consider how these constructions are reflected in legislation and international treaties and take account of research addressing the likely consequences of minimum working age legislation when they decide whether to ratify the Minimum Age Convention, 1973.
Even though fiction and fantasy are fundamental to how childhoods today are understood, this is a topic that is seldom explored either theoretically or academically. We address the question of how the relationship between material real and fictive real can be understood in new ways in contemporary society. We suggest that fiction can be understood in other ways than the hitherto dichotomized approaches to it, and our aim is to focus on the hybridity that is created through the interconnecting word and, as in fiction and childhood and material real and fictive real. This article explores how fiction can be understood as hybrid and interrelated rather than a pure and separate phenomenon, and in particular how materiality as something real and fiction as real mingle. This article introduces ways to talk about the fictive real as realunreality and highlights the drawbacks that might stem from these concepts since in several ways they re-enact childhood innocence and nostalgia, as well as negative differences between childhood and adulthood, where different childhoods share a subordinate position in society.
Understanding how best to nurture children’s respect for, and care of, other living beings is a concern within education and animal welfare science. Relationships with individual animals are often seen as a ‘bridge’ to caring about the broader environment (of people, animals and ecosystems). However, little is known about children’s actual care of the animals they know best. Focus groups explored 7- to 13-year-olds’ caring activities and sense of responsibility to care for family pets, with findings highlighting the strong influence of parental roles and restrictions, the significance of play as a form of care and reluctance to take responsibility.
This article presents a discussion about the clinical referral of a paediatric HIV patient to outside child protection services as an attempt to make her adhere to antiretroviral medicine. It draws on the difficult case of Andrea, observed at a paediatric HIV clinic. I argue that child protection enforces the line between adolescence and adulthood by intervening into patient lives under the rationale that child patients are vulnerable and not capable of making informed life choices. Child protection contradicts clinical policies that attempt to make patients responsible adults before leaving the paediatric ward by alienating adolescents towards services.
This article examines the social work practices towards children in care in Denmark. For this purpose, it reworks Honneth’s theory of recognition, so it fits with the axiomatic propositions of the new social studies of childhood. The analysis shows how the life of these children unfolds as a continuous struggle over recognition with negative consequences for their well-being. It is argued that while these struggles take place in face-to-face interactions, the violence of recognition is based on wider social structures, such as the generational order, familization of children’s emotional needs and a problematizing, individualistic diagnostic approach to deviation.
Despite extensive research on the causes of bullying and how it can be stopped, little is known about how some children overcome or avoid a position as victim of bullying. Based on analyses of three ‘extreme cases’ in which peer victimization has been stopped or prevented, the article attempts to describe how and why some children succeed in overcoming their position of victim of bullying. The analyses indicate that it is possible to exceed or avert the victim position, but the strategies applied are different and the issue of dignity emerges as important in the victims’ struggle for acceptance.
This study explores the ways immigrant children interpret the migration of their mothers and the reunification in the host society. The research was based on 28 interviews with children of Latin American and East European origin who rejoined their mothers at different ages. The findings highlight that immigrant children are active agents in family reunifications and are able to (re)make and negotiate kin relations with their mothers. Even though the mother–child relationship is usually assumed to be ‘natural’ and biological kinship is considered the essential basis for the relationship, for reunited children social kinship is more important than the biological link. Kin relations with mothers are constructed in everyday life, and the outcomes can be more or less positive. The final aim is to underline how migrant children can influence kin relations within their reunited families and to gain a broader understanding of family reunification patterns.
Little is known about separated asylum seeking young people in foster care. This article addresses this gap by drawing together findings from qualitative research conducted with separated refugee and asylum seeking young people in two studies – one in England and one in Ireland. Focusing on the role of culture, the authors examine similar findings from the two studies on the significance of culture in young people’s experiences of foster care. Culturally ‘matched’ placements are often assumed to provide continuity in relation to cultural identity. This article draws on young people’s accounts of ‘matched’ and ‘non-matched’ placements to examine the extent to which this may be the case for separated young people. It was found that young people regarded it as important to maintain continuity in relation to their cultures of origin, but that cultural ‘matching’ with foster carers according to country of origin and/or religion was not the only means for achieving this. The authors suggest that practitioners need to adopt an individualised approach in determining whether a ‘matched’ or a cross-cultural placement best meets the various needs of separated young people, including their identity development needs.
Young children’s screams have been misunderstood at best and at worst subjected to discipline. Drawing upon data from an ethnography in a London nursery, this article suggests that not only are screams part of the ‘soundscape’, but they are overflowing with meanings including about inequities in the social order of educational settings. These meanings are afforded by the physical and sociocultural aspects of voice quality, as well as overcivilizing efforts. Suggesting an approach of methodological answerability in listening to ‘the scream’, the article considers voice quality in relation to what matters and as a mode of potential transgressive and political articulation.
The division of labour between men and women has been thoroughly discussed in Norway over the last decades, in research as well as in political and public debate. In contrast, there has been little recognition of children’s involvement in work, and differences between girls’ and boys’ work is seldom addressed. This article looks at the extent of children’s work at home, how work is distributed among girls and boys, and whether gender variations correlate with parents’ socialization goals, work statuses and level of education. The findings show that there are small but significant differences between girls’ and boys’ involvement in work at home. It is also found that there is a significant gender bias in how children perceive expectations of work and participation at home. There is, however, little evidence to support that gender differences derive from gendered differences in parents’ socialization goals (values) or as gendered role models (work status and educational level). The authors argue that the variations are more likely to derive from a generalized socially constructed image of what mothers and fathers do. This article contributes to the ongoing discussion about the reproduction of gender roles and gendered practices in a society characterized by a strong orientation towards gender equality.
Child mortality rates (0–4 years) between 1979 and 2010 and poverty were shown to be significantly worse in five of the six English-speaking countries than in the other 15 western nations suggesting that in these countries children are relatively disadvantaged.
The Swedish preschool curriculum not only prescribes documentation and quality assessment, it also requires children’s participation in the documentation process, although it offers no directions on how the documenting should be done, which can leave teachers unsure of how to do it. This study differs from research that presents pedagogical documentation as a way of enabling children’s participation in preschool in that it explores children’s participation in producing different forms of documentation in a Swedish preschool – and it finds that such participation is complex. The findings imply that, whether documentation is activity-integrated or retrospective, different forms of participation are possible.
Palestinian children living amidst political and military violence are often labeled as affected by post-traumatic stress syndromes. Some researchers report that a majority of Palestinian children suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder and other stress-related psychiatric impairments in the wake of military incursions and bombings. On the other hand, data from field research and clinical experience show that these children continue to display positive functioning in terms of adjustment to trauma, despite the adverse environmental conditions. This article reports on qualitative research with children from two refugee camps in the West Bank, Occupied Palestinian Territories: Nur Shams and Tulkarm. Thematic content analysis was applied to narratives and written materials produced by 74 school-age children during two summer camps held in the Tulkarm region in 2010 and 2011. The aims of the study were: (a) to explore the domains of well-being that help children cope with violence and insecurity and (b) to investigate whether experiential activities focused on emotional and relational competences influenced children’s self-perceived well-being. Personal, environmental, micro- and macro-social factors were identified as playing a role in well-being. The article discusses the limitations of the study and its implications for clinical and community work with children exposed to political and military threat.
Drawing on data from a Swedish primary school, this article explores how the schoolyard and places within the schoolyard are discursively used in processing gender identity. The analysis of children’s narratives in relation to four identified key places indicated diverse and parallel ways of processing gender identity, and that spatial characteristics formed different conditions for processing gender identity. The analysis stresses the importance of understanding gender identity as spatial and diverse and children as active agents in processing this identity. Following the analysis outlined in the article, it is argued that a spatially diverse and multi-characteristic schoolyard is likely to meet various and parallel ways of processing gender identity to a greater extent than a schoolyard with low spatial variety. In general, representations of an ‘active’, ‘playing with everybody’, ‘rule-abiding’, and ‘gendered’ school child were not challenged to any great extent. This result indicates the power of institutional and societal forming and framing in contemporary outdoor school environments.
Drawing on two ethnographic studies of everyday middle-class family life in Los Angeles and Rome, this cross-cultural study examines parents’ practices of and beliefs about involvement in children’s education. It analyzes parents’ interviews and naturalistic video recordings of parent–child interactions at home to access parents’ perspectives on and ways of enacting involvement in school-related activities. Findings indicate that while the LA and Rome parents engaged in similar practices, their involvement in their children’s education was experienced differently and motivated by different assumptions. The article argues that differences in parents’ perceptions and practices reflect and reproduce marked cultural preferences and expectations within the local education systems and reveal distinct ideologies regarding childhood. Drawing on Halldén, the study proposes that LA parents tended to treat childhood as a period of ‘preparation’ for adulthood where there is more deliberate shaping of a child’s path, displaying a belief that children’s future much depends on present actions. Rome parents tended to view their child less as a project that they needed to work on, leaving room for children’s autonomy and freedom. Finally, the study argues that the examination of local sociocultural and institutional contexts offers a more comprehensive and situated interpretation of Italian and US parents’ choices and actions.
When facing the prospect of moving to a new country to join their migrant parents, children’s expectations and imaginings revolve around entering a new school environment. While prospective young migrants show awareness of the challenges that learning a language may entail, the possibility of facing discrimination is seldom entertained. However, children who have recently moved relate that episodes of discrimination and even racism within the school walls are not rare, nor are they confined to other pupils. This article highlights the importance of non-verbal communication in shaping young migrants’ perceptions, and argues that children’s outward adaptation to school demands may mask sustained feelings of marginalisation and exclusion.
The 1990s witnessed the replacement of psychological perspectives seeing children as ‘becomings’ to a view of them as ‘beings’. This is challenged by the Foucauldian concept of governmentality understood as technologies of self-making actors capable of monitoring and controlling their own behaviour. This concept is central in the present study of so-called teddy-diaries, which are texts written by first graders and their parents and circulated among other families as part of the Norwegian school curriculum. A key finding of the analyses is that these circulated and displayed texts represent technologies for governing families – especially in reinforcing expectations about how ‘normal’ childhood and family life should be lived.
The article reports findings from a study of negative and harmful experiences of children participating in organised sport in the UK focusing in particular on emotional harm. A convenience sample of 6124 young people (age 18–22) completed an online survey about their experiences of sport as children (up to age 16); 89 follow-up telephone interviews were conducted. The article provides information about the emotional harm of children in sport and the context within which it occurs. It provides some evidence of a sporting culture where emotional harm is widespread at all levels of sport and commonly experienced by children of all ages.
This case study explores how student migration impacts low-income fourth grade African American and Latino children in the US who leave their neighborhoods to attend a state-of-the-art facility in a downtown urban area. Children at the World Citizens School (WCS) convey how safety plays a key role in their restrictions by parents and in their daily lives in a near total institutional environment. The use of multiple methods show how the social relations of community are modified by student migration and how one community is displaced by another.
This article offers a methodological contribution to the concept of children’s voices and the ways of listening to them. Children’s voices are studied in a narrative ethnographical research project in a school classroom. The authors follow children’s voices from the level of classroom observation to an analysis on narrative data produced by the Storycrafting method and finally to a more reflexive analysis. By defining three interrelated analytical spaces, the study illustrates how voices are emergent, contingent on their social, discursive and physical environments and power relations, and constructed in reciprocal processes of telling and listening. Finally, the authors discuss the significance of reflexive listening to children’s voices.
The traditional notions of care appear to be connected to parents as caregivers and children as care-recipients. This article explores care in the context of post-divorce families to underline the need for re-evaluating the causal understanding of this concept. The data are drawn from a qualitative study investigating how Danish children aged 8–12 (and their parents) conduct their everyday lives with time-sharing arrangements as a result of parental divorce. Through empirical examples, different kinds of caring practices are highlighted to assert that care is a situated and reciprocal process between parents and children – a process of mutual caregiving and caretaking.
The existing critical literature on constructions of childhood and parenthood is only beginning to listen to what parents have to say. As a result, parents may paradoxically be viewed as passive victims and therefore reduced to be the spectators of what is supposed to be their ‘problem’. The present study analyses dominant parent advice texts in the Flemish community of Belgium, as well as the voices of parents on the Internet. The study confirms the tendencies noticed in critical literature: the tendency to individualize responsibilities and the focus on autonomy in the neoliberal era. In addition it unveils the double bind nature of autonomy in expert discourse. It also illustrates the performative agency of parents, as co-constructors of dominant discourse as well as contesting this discourse. In so doing, the study complements the existing vein of literature with the way in which parents think of and experience the dominant parenting discourse.
This article focuses on preschool children in Kyrgyzstan, a poor country of the former Soviet union. What are children’s views on the relational order in this transition society, and what is their contribution to the reproduction or challenging of this order? The authors use and elaborate the theoretical concepts of ‘agency’ and ‘collectivism-individualism’ to develop age-appropriate research instruments and to interpret children’s views. Data were collected in a mixed-method field study. The presented results show children’s agency in a tight hierarchical structure, revealing both complicity and self-assertion, occasionally resulting in opposition.
This article examines how ideals of children’s participation and model consistency compete in social workers’ accounts of intervention outcomes in 35 evaluation interviews in Sweden. Using discursive psychology, the analysis demonstrates how the social workers rely on category-based accounts: They describe willing children as competent, unwilling children as developing, and children attempting to rule in counselling as problematic. The interviews’ focus on following the intervention model constructs a limited, predetermined participation that only respects children’s wishes when they agree with the intervention. In showing this, the study contributes to further understanding of tensions between the principle and practice of participation.
Child–matter relations are often approached teleologically: as serving a distinct purpose often related to socialization and/or development as maturation. Unless these approaches are diversified, children’s relations to their material surroundings are reduced to instrumental activity the significance of which is predetermined and known by adults. This article is based on a study with 12 Finnish children of ages four to seven, exemplifying a new materialist and post-humanist approach to child–matter relations as intra-active. Children’s engagement with ‘things’ is considered intrinsically relevant: as an end in itself. The questions asked are: How do children and their material surroundings intra-act? What is produced in this intra-action? Two characteristics of child–matter intra-action are identified as mingling and imitating. What the intra-action is seen to produce are spaces of open-ended and de-individualized knowing and being.
Despite the increased effort to understand resilience processes in the lives of youth, the homogeneity of a largely westernized concept needs to be challenged in studies by incorporating meanings of resilience more relevant to youth around the globe. This requires a reconsideration of the methods used to study youth resilience. This article outlines the interactive dialogical process involved in visual elicitation methods that combine moving and still images, resulting in a broader reflective exploration of research questions. Consideration is given specifically to how the combination of these methods better facilitates exploration of previously unarticulated experiences of marginalized youth populations and the processes they engage in to nurture and sustain resilience.
In France, definitions of childhood and relations between adults (parents, professionals, public authorities, scientists, even sociologists ...) and children, continue to be matters of debate in everyday life, scientific practices and political arenas. This article intends to show how these debates can be analysed as an object of research, using Boltanski’s sociological model of Justification. The presentation of this framework highlights its relations to the contributions of two other French sociologists whose works are not directly interested in childhood: Bourdieu and Latour. It is centred on two main aspects of this model: the study of operations of critiques and justifications based on a pragmatic sociology of critique and the idea of its double requirement: equality and order between human beings. It shows how this framework can be useful for thinking about childhood–adulthood relations as a moral and political order which is an object of debates. Then, from an historical example, the author proposes a short case study of what may be called an analysis of the moral sense of justice towards children.
The article examines how children use bodily expressions as an instrument of power and a method of being heard when adults place them in positions of powerlessness in everyday life practice. The main focus is on children with social difficulties. The article focuses on children and adults in situations during time spent outdoors. The findings show that children and staff have different perceptions of what is desirable, and that they use different power mechanisms to change or maintain the power of definition.
This article draws links between the sense of smell, aesthetic choices concerning clothes, ideas about modernity and the aspirations of young British Bangladeshis. In doing so it highlights the preconscious and conscious factors that inform the identities that British Bangladeshis express. The article argues that despite its importance for our sense of belonging, the sense of smell has been neglected in accounts of identity. This discussion leads to a critique of Bourdieu’s notion of habitus and illustrates the ways in which the conscious elements of habitus draw upon the unconscious. Dispositions towards the smell of Bangladesh feed into ways in which British Bangladeshis express their identities through aesthetic choices and in turn reveal preferences for different discourses of modernity.
In the last three decades, the development of the artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) sector has been increasing in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), bringing more and more urban families into this flourishing business sector, and among them, children. This article aims to look at the often unconceivable, and as a result neglected, social agency of children even when they are involved in activities which are, in the international legislation on children’s rights, categorized as one of the worst forms of child labour. To do so, it relies on the results of a socio-anthropological collective research project on children’s mining activities which was carried out in a small locality called La Ruashi in the city of Lubumbashi (Province of Katanga). The article aims to provide a comprehensive understanding of these child mining-related activities by looking at different spheres of social relations within which children are embedded. Examining the set of social relations that children have with their families, the broader community and their ‘peers’, several ‘family portraits’ are offered, highlighting a heterogeneity of social interpretations regarding this form of child work. It is shown that for families from a middle-class background, this kind of work is often socially disruptive, at the forefront of intergenerational conflict. As for families from lower classes, social changes induced by children’s mining activities are often better incorporated into the family habitus. Common dynamics, encountered in all families irrespective of class belonging, is also portrayed.
Contemporary Nordic early childhood education and care takes as its starting point the individual and ‘competent’ child and emphasizes the aim to take account of children’s views. It is also common in educational settings that the child’s views are documented and thus transformed into contexts in which they are discussed between the adults. In light of a case study of 22 parent–teacher meetings in Finnish early childhood education and care the article discusses the position of the child’s voice in this context. The theoretical framework is based on a relational view of childhood and the child’s voice, on theories of face-to-face and institutional interaction and on discursive psychology. The article highlights the multifaceted relational processes in which the child’s participation is embedded in adult-led institutional practices.
This article, based on a qualitative analysis of 81 legal opinions, considers the relationship between judicial conceptions of childhood and the speech rights of American public school students. The author presents six main principles from the opinions and examines the relationship between them and conceptions of childhood. The article shows that the opinions reflect three primary conceptions of childhood: as a period walled off from adulthood in which children are subjects; as a period of becoming in which children are civic learners; and as a period akin to adulthood in which adults and children, as well as their respective rights, are fundamentally the same. The article concludes that judicial conceptions of childhood have helped produce a body of law that reflects and perpetuates society’s inconsistent and ambivalent beliefs regarding childhood.
The present article discusses how 12 children (five to eight years) in planned lesbian families talk about families, parents and specifically ‘daddies’ as such and not having a father themselves. Findings from child interviews demonstrate that the children described daddies as ‘the same’ as mummies, i.e. as having the same functions. This contrasts with previous research showing how children of heterosexuals often describe mothers and fathers as different. The children varied in terms of how they labelled donors. Some children adopted the denomination ‘daddy’, drawing on a paternity discourse, while others simply referred to him as ‘a man’.
This article is based on ethnographic fieldwork research conducted in the semi-arid region of northeastern Brazil and addresses the unexpected role the children came to fulfil in the household as a consequence of the Programa Bolsa Família, a conditional cash transfer programme. In its design, the programme was intended for families and had a clear focus on women, aiming at empowering them. However, the article shows how children became considered the main agents responsible for the family’s continued access to the benefit and as a consequence, how they came to bear the responsibility for the family’s financial survival.
This article is based on an ethnographic study that explored everyday food practices and relationships in three residential children’s homes in Scotland. On the one hand, food practices in residential child care can be used to cross intergenerational boundaries in a positive, enabling and caring manner. On the other hand, food can be interpreted differently by children and staff, at times resulting in negative interactions which may involve control and resistance. Thus food practices in a residential care setting can be used both to develop a sense of unity across the generations as well as reinforcing intergenerational power inequalities.
Moving beyond the cultural clash model that treats intergenerational relationships as unidirectional, this study, based on in-depth interviews with working-class bilingual Korean children from Los Angeles, finds that they actively assume class-specific language brokering work to ensure family survival. However, because class remains as the invisible social force in America, children who learned about parental financial and legal problems through language brokering work maintained the hidden injury of class. The findings indicate that normative notions of carefree childhood, racialized class, and essentialized Korean culture, which uniformly uphold quintessential middle-class values, can impart a buried sense of inadequacy and desire among socially excluded working-class children.
This article analyzes and compares two instances of national border crossing that involve decisions about children from China: children whose Canadian relatives have applied to adopt them, and unaccompanied children who seek refugee status. Discourse analysis of interviews, hearings, and official documents in the two cases demonstrates how the ‘innocence’ and ‘best interests’ of children are produced through three specific forms of knowledge: age, generational ordering, and most significantly, cultural readings of Chinese kinship. By examining the two cases of relative adoption and unaccompanied refugee claimants next to each other, the article reveals some of the institutional discourses through which childhood is constructed in the socio-legal discretionary power over immigration. The study also considers how the flexible deployment of conceptualizations of childhood, especially imaginaries of culturally ‘other’ kinship and childhood, serve the production of the nation-state.
In the past two decades, the iconography of victimhood mobilized by child rights advocates has changed significantly. In particular, the child victim of violence has replaced the street child as the dominant icon on the international agenda. Based on data from more than 300 documents produced between 1989 and 2009 and interviews with leading advocates, this article explores the diverging trajectories of iconic child victims. It follows the traces of the successive translations of the idea of ‘stolen childhood’ and locates them against the backdrop of evolutions in the children’s rights field.
Children have an unsettled relationship with the status of citizenship, being given some rights, responsibilities and opportunities for participation, and being denied others. Yet if citizenship is conceived of as a practice, children can be firmly seen as citizens in the sense that they are social actors, negotiating and contributing to relationships of social interdependence. This article develops understandings of children’s agency in citizenship and some of the different ways in which children’s actions enact them as interdependent citizens. It presents one aspect of the understanding of citizenship generated from research with six groups of marginalized children, aged 5–13, in Wales and France. Synthesizing the research groups’ descriptions of activities they associated with the component parts of citizenship with citizenship theory, these children can be seen to engage in actions of citizenship that include making rules of social existence, furthering social good and exercising freedoms to achieve their own rights. Their activities also transgress the boundaries of existing balances of rights, responsibilities and statuses, through their (mis)behaviour, in ways that can be interpreted as Acts of citizenship. In children’s everyday activities, however, the distinction between actions and Acts of citizenship can at times be blurred. This is because recognizing aspects of children’s practices as citizenship is a challenge to dominant definitions of citizenship, and claims a new status for children. Exploring children’s citizenship in these ways has the potential to widen understandings of participation and appreciation of broader aspects of children’s agency in citizenship.
Pre-teen children’s knowledge and experience of alcohol has been the subject of relatively little research despite the fact that this is a critical time given that the average age for the onset of drinking in Europe is now 12. Indeed, children are commonly only addressed in national alcohol strategies as the responsibility of parents/families, rather than as an audience for such messages in their own right. Yet, it is important to take a cross-generational perspective by exploring pre-teen children’s understandings of alcohol, as well as that of their parents, because adults and children may experience familial socialisation practices around alcohol differently. Too often adults’ views about what is in the best interests of children are read through the lens of age-appropriate behaviours which are predicated on deterministic theories of child development in which pre-teens are presumed to be too emotionally or physically immature to express their opinions, rather than on children’s own experiences of their life-worlds. This article draws on empirical research from a study of the role of alcohol in UK family life. It comprised a telephone survey of a nationally representative sample of 2089 parents with at least one child aged 5–12, and multi-stage case study research (including child-centred research) with 10 families who were purposively sampled from the survey. The findings presented in this article are primarily drawn from the child-centred element of the research supplemented by some data from the survey and interviews with parents. The article explores children’s knowledge of alcohol, their understanding of the health risks and social harms associated with drinking and the implications for national alcohol strategies. The conclusion highlights the significance of children’s experiential learning about alcohol through a proximity effect which occurs within the affective space of the familial home.
Imaginary companions of school age children are a relatively unexplored phenomenon. This article reports on a qualitative study carried out in the UK investigating British children’s perceptions of their imaginary companions. Eight children aged between 5 and 11 years were interviewed. Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis was used to explore individual and cross-case themes. It was found that imaginary companions provided friendship, playmates and entertainment, enabling children to overcome times of boredom and loneliness. They appeared to provide a level of wish fulfilment for some children. Children’s interactions with their imaginary companions provided support when there were problem situations in the children’s lives.
This article focuses on children’s food in families and the power relations in which it is embedded. Drawing on paired interviews with parents and younger children in a qualitative sample (N = 47), and taking a case approach, the article analyses ways in which power and control are negotiated in parent–child relationships in relation to food. Types and extent of control over children’s eating are described, and the importance of resources and parents’ conceptions of ‘the child’ considered. In distinction to polarized debates about who does, or should, control children’s food in families, the article notes considerable variation between families.
Childhood research with children in poverty involves a diversity of dilemmas and complexities. In the context of a recent research project in Belgium, the authors attempt to embrace child poverty as a normative issue created a crisis of representation. In order to untangle this, they situate different methodological approaches in relation to the constructed epistemological windows on child poverty. The authors differentiate between research in which the authentic voice of children in poverty is represented, and research in which their lifeworld is interpreted through a lifeworld orientation perspective that pursues human dignity and social justice in our societies.
Policies and practices around school work, operating within and beyond the family, are fundamentally rooted in and perpetuate a particular generational order. Working from a temporal perspective this article focuses on ‘school work’ in order to demonstrate how time operates across spheres as a key means of constructing generation, making not only children, but school children. Outlining UK policies on school children’s time-use, and employing findings from a study of families with teenagers, the article examines how the temporal entanglement of school work and family life contributes to the ongoing (re)construction of generation during this key period of ‘growing up’.
This study explores how siblings in Tanzania actively engage in their own socialization through the negotiation and local design of caregiving practices and control between younger siblings (age 1–3), older siblings (age 3–13) and adults. Analyses of moment-to-moment embodied, multimodal sequences of interaction illustrate how caregiving responsibility is negotiated. The analysis is multidisciplinary drawing on concepts developed in the traditions of sociology, language socialization and applied linguistics. The findings highlight the usefulness of a concept of socialization which recognizes the agency of the child and are discussed in relation to constructions of the caregiving child as both being and becoming.
International children’s rights discourses are centred on the principles of child protection and participation. Underpinning these discourses is the assumption that when children express their views they will support children’s rights principles. However, this is not a guarantee. On key issues affecting their lives such as children’s work and labour, children’s views are often in striking opposition to the dominant children’s rights discourse. This can be attributed to the fact that children’s views show a more nuanced assessment of their situation which challenge simplistic dichotomies about good vs bad. Thus, there is a need to move beyond simple dichotomies and, instead, seek to understand the complexities of children’s lives. This article contributes to this discussion by exploring children’s perceptions of the physical punishment they experience at the hands of parents and other primary caregivers in Ghana and the meanings they themselves attach to the practice. Further, it examines the implications this has for the dominant children’s rights discourse. Data presented in this paper are based on a one-year project funded by the Nuffield Foundation in the UK.
This article analyses the subjective experiences of adoptive parenthood among Spanish parents with regard to becoming and feeling like a father and mother. The article is based on analysis of data from group discussions held with pre- and post-adoptive parents in Catalonia, Spain, as part of a wider study of family, education and belonging on national and international adoption in Spain. Adoptive families start with parental knowledge and practices that were not created for the unique features of their families. Some adoptive parents who express difficulties in exercising their parenthood question the relevance of parental practices, the construction of parental bonds and the socially accepted concept of ‘child’.
The article suggests reconceptualizing the role of ‘children’s voices’ in childhood studies. By taking an institutional setting of early (or rather, earliest) childhood education and care as a test case, it argues for and empirically demonstrates a double shift in research perspectives. First, the principle of ‘giving voice to children’s voices’ is turned from an overarching research objective into a central object of research. Second, the metaphorical and the non-metaphorical meaning of ‘voice’ are clearly separated in order to relate them anew. Voices are observed and taken into account with respect to their sonic phenomenality before any abstract notions of ‘children’s voices’ come into play. By taking into account that even children with little or no speech mostly do have a voice, the paradoxical formula of ‘giving voice to children’s voices’ gains a renewed sensitizing function in research practice. Analyses of field notes delineate a range of observable vocal phenomena and respective social practices of ‘giving voice’ in a crèche and detect both various strategies of verbalization as well as strategies of practically dealing with children’s hearable voices.
The article explores child participation from the perspective of the sociology of action. Despite the important literature on child participation following adoption of the UNCRC, a consistent theory of child participation is still missing. The distinction between the child as a subject of rights and the child as a social actor draws attention to the cumulative and systemic nature of action. Applications of a new model going in this direction are presented. They foster discussion on children’s agency and give insights for assessing implicit theories of action lying behind child participation.
Within the field of children’s participation there has been a shift from adults mediating children’s worlds to children themselves becoming the sole interpreters of their own standpoints. In the process this has sometimes led to the marginalisation of adults’ perspectives on and contributions to children’s participation. In this article the author argues that analyses of children’s participatory roles need to take account of the form and nature of children’s relationships with adults. Drawing on the notion of intergenerational dialogue the article explores a range of political and global themes that highlight the participatory roles of children and their interdependence on adults.