Childhood

The physical features of a primary school playground – dimensions, textures, furnishings, etc. – are incorporated and adapted for their own purposes by children in their free play. Youngsters create an intricate network of usage, play-lines invisible but known to every child at the school. Unfortunately, the general adult indifference to children’s playlore often results in a lack of consultation with the playground’s users when well-meaning but ignorant ‘landscaping’ of a school playground is undertaken.

In their everyday lives, children largely stay within and relate to three settings – their homes, schools and recreational institutions. These environments have been created by adults and designated by them as ‘places for children’. A more differentiated picture of children’s spatial culture emerges when children discuss and take photographs of settings that are meaningful to them. This article applies the concept ‘children’s places’ to explain the fact that children relate not only to official places provided by adults, but also to informal places, often unnoticed by adults. The analysis sheds light on interfaces and discontinuities between ‘places for children’ and ‘children’s places’ and argues that the concept should not be underestimated in the sociology of childhood.

Like many parents in the US, teen mothers regularly have professional portraits taken of their children. This article, based on an ethnographic study of a diverse group of teen mothers in urban California, analyzes these baby pictures as representations of childhood, motherhood and family, and as material objects used in the construction of kin networks. Through these portraits teen mothers construct themselves as good mothers, resisting public denunciations of their childbearing at the same time that they embrace consumer culture. Small photos are exchanged with their friends and family members, contributing to a culture of care, albeit one based on market principles.

Through their legal status as ‘minors’, American teenagers are legally prohibited from property ownership. In order to claim places, therefore, young people must appropriate and occupy the places of others. This makes territorial markers and behavior the primary mode of spatial claiming among teens, but adults tend not to recognize the legitimacy of territory in a tenured or ownershipbased spatial system. This article explores some territorial modes of place-making, the conflicts that arise between youth and adults over their places, and the responses by teens to increased restriction and spatial surveillance of the American landscape.

The article investigates the tensions between and within models of gender equality and gender complementarity by studying children who are in the midst of learning to apply these gender models in practice. Children (aged 11–15 years) were observed and interviewed while they participated in scout camps in Denmark, Portugal, Slovakia and Russia. Through structural and symbolic gender splits in spaces, positions, activities and competences, children create, reproduce and sometimes challenge the specific gender hierarchies of their culture: they learn the gender lessons of ‘heroes and mothers’, ‘soldiers and waitresses’, ‘father and child’ and ‘adult and boy’. The article is based on the project ‘One of the Boys? Doing Gender in European Scouting’.

In this article, the author invokes Michel Foucault's analysis of panopticism to understand the performance of mothering in the suburban playground. The mothers in the ring of park benches symbolize the suggestion of surveillance, which Foucault describes as the technology of disciplinary power under liberal ideals of governance. However, the panoptic force of the mothers around the suburban playground becomes a community that gazes at the children only to ultimately gaze at one another, seeing reflected in the children the parenting abilities of one another. The author analyzes the elaborate rules of playground etiquette and social competition that occupy the mothers, linking their social discourses to the public neighborhood playground as a symbol for child-centered (suburban) ideology. The author then compares the mothers at suburban playgrounds with the parents that she observed at McDonald's PlayPlaces, which affords different context of use, design and social opportunities. She argues that maternal social worlds need to be understood in relation to the play of children on playgrounds and the increasing appeal of commercial playplaces.

In the ‘Our Town’ project, 20 urban children designed and built an intervention in their neighborhood. The process involved extensive collaboration with the community at large and resulted in a park. This construction was developed in direct contrast to a more typical adult conception of a playground. Children’s concerns in their design included issues of intergenerational interaction, safety, comfort and visual delight. The success of the project speaks to the depth of knowledge, and lack of political agenda, which may permit children to be designers and advocates for change in their neighborhoods. This article seeks to identify and address questions regarding the inclusion of children as effective and appropriate resources for input in design and advocacy for change in their built environment.