Childhood

This article presents a childhood beyond the Confucian shadow by studying children at play. It looks at the Confucian image of the ideal child and its association with the traditional Chinese perceptions of play and the education of children. Against this conceptual and historical discussion, children’s games and toys are analysed to provide an insight into some crucial, unstated elements in a child’s daily life in traditional Chinese society. This may also be meaningful to our understanding of childhood and children’s education in contemporary China.

Citizenship is not merely a formal status. It is a source of human rights and entitles its owners to services, protection and benefits. Citizenship stipulates what obligations a citizen must fulfil and in what manner he or she is to behave. Citizenship is the prerequisite for belonging to a group (from a social and historical perspective) and as such bears a significant impact on identity formation. Therefore, citizenship is crucial for the well-being of human beings in general and for children in particular. Children’s civil status (and their citizenship) determines their rights (including their social, political and civil rights). Furthermore, children’s possibilities to develop and practise various civil skills, and therefore their activities as citizens, have a major impact on their well-being, as children of today and adult citizens of tomorrow. The article discusses the relations between citizenship - rights - and the well-being of children. Children’s rights are examined, throughout the course of their development, in a range of aspects of their lives. An overview of children’s rights and their civil status in Israel is presented, by the age at which children are entitled to them. A further focus is on the ‘dynamics of citizenship’ by analysing child participation and its influence on children’s well-being.

Adolescents with emotional, interpersonal and even academic problems can benefit from using social services. However, these adolescents are unlikely to seek help from social services, thus creating issues in service underutilization. Supposedly, these adolescents may not find social services to be useful or socially desirable. How these perceptions impede adolescents’ help-seeking intention is the focus of the present study, which collected data from 1065 junior high school students in Hong Kong, China. Results support the hypotheses that the perceived usefulness of social services and perceived societal disdain for seeking help from the services affected students’ likelihood of help seeking in the presence of problems. These findings generally hold for students who seek help to deal with academic, emotional and interpersonal problems. Promoting the image of social services is therefore necessary to encourage adolescents with problems to seek help from the services.

This article looks at the recent contributions made by feminists who advocate a distinctive ‘ethic of care’ to replace the conventional ‘ethic of rights’. The article explores ways in which the ethic of care could be utilized and applied to the children’s rights context. After looking at the important feminist criticisms of conventional rights-based approaches, it is argued that there needs to be some caution applied to the feminist ethic of care, if it is to be successfully applied to the context of children. These cautions are that it is important to recognize the contested nature of care and not to valorize the perspectives of carers over those being cared for. Second, the feminist ethic of care might lead to a ‘needs-based’ discourse, an approach that is unsatisfactory in its implications for children’s rights. Finally, conceptions of justice and equality must not be dropped from political arguments. Rather, their limitations must be acknowledged and then used strategically and partially. However, despite these cautions, the feminist ethic of care remains a constructive approach to the children’s rights context as it emphasizes responsibilities and relationships, the concrete contexts of caring interdependencies, and allows children to be active social players with a voice rather than passive recipients of care and rights. It is hoped that this article might serve as both a corrective and conceptual enrichment of the feminist ethic of care.

Girls’ bodies are often constructed negatively and passively in their dominant cultures, but at the same time, girls may collectively construct menstruation and the body in creative ways. By exploring menstrual talk in individual and group interview data from mostly white, high school age girls and boys in the US, this study finds that girls draw on their bodies in social interaction to exert agency in their negotiations with the gendered world and social structure. These types of agency are based within the girls’ sense of responsibility and management of menstruation, their knowledge of menstruation and their social interpretations of menstruation.

What are children’s perceptions and experience of parent-child relationships in Hong Kong, where westernization (modernization) has met with the indigenous Chinese culture? This article focuses on how school children in Hong Kong are constantly grappling with ‘Chinese’ and ‘western’ traditions in the parent-child relationship as they hear different voices from school guidance professionals, school principals, teachers and parents in an already hybridized society at large. Findings suggest that school stakeholders hold different views about the parent-child relationship and that parents are the most ambivalent about their parental role, being caught between the traditional idea of authority and submission, and the modern idea of equality. Furthermore, discrepancies between belief and behaviour are causing tensions for all stakeholders. The findings have theoretical as well as practical implications in teacher training, parent education and guidance programmes for primary school children.