Childhood

This article explores the ideas about children’s participation in decision-making held by government officials and non-government representatives engaged in promoting children’s participation in the Philippines. It suggests that the ideas that policy-makers and service deliverers hold about children’s participation are heterogeneous, diverse and complex. While adults’ attitudes are often presented as serious barriers to children’s participation, this study suggests that they are both obstructive and facilitative. A deeper understanding of the range of ideas held by adults, particularly policy-makers and service providers, may be the critical next step in progressing children’s participation in a direction that is meaningful for children and influential in terms of policy outcomes.

Drawing upon in-depth interviews with mothers in the US about feeding their young children, this article examines how consumer culture — broadly construed — constitutes part of the indispensable context of mothering practices. The argument put forward is that mothers not only provide food and sustenance for their children, but necessarily encounter, engage with and make use of commercial meanings of foodstuffs as part and parcel of the caring work they accomplish while providing food and meals. The concept of ‘semantic provisioning’ is meant to capture the meaning-making labor of mothers as it arises in sometimes contentious negotiations with children over ‘proper’ and ‘appropriate’ foodstuffs and meals. The approach offered seeks to demonstrate how commerce, sentiment, caring and children’s subjectivities interweave at the level of practice.

Participatory research with children in the main focuses on short-term interactions. As this practice develops, questions about longer-term consequences for participants have arisen, examining the empowering claims for this research approach. This article reports the findings from continued contact with participants of an ethnographic participatory research project. Longitudinal interviews emphasize the lasting influence of their experience of adults in primary school and the resulting constructions of learning relationships. Their perceptions of authority, discipline, violence and justice are portrayed as pivotal in these young people’s transitions to more mature identities. In the cluster of narratives the research discussion elicits, these themes interweave. The article demonstrates that understanding the significance and meaning of children’s perspectives is a process that unfolds over time, and requires, as Christensen and Prout advocate, continuing dialogues with children and with social science colleagues. This process leads this researcher to a reassessment of what constitutes ‘participation’. The power constraints of which children are keenly aware shape the extent to which they engage in participatory research and the ways in which they may find it empowering.

This study measures attitudes towards children’s vulnerability or empowerment within consumer culture, based on data from a representative population survey (N = 1475) conducted in Estonia in 2005. The study use indices comprised of assessments of consumption practices and assertions pertaining to the ‘endangered vs empowered child’ debate in consumer and media studies. The results of the analysis show that consumerism and brand valuation are more strongly predicted by age and income and opinions about children’s vulnerability to advertising are mostly influenced by education and gender. Attitudes on the socializing role of the media are poorly explained by sociodemographic variables, although income and education play a more important role.

This article draws upon biographical interview material from a mixed-method British study of workers caring for vulnerable children: residential social workers, family support workers, foster carers and community childminders. It has two aims: (1) to identify the contexts — the particular events, circumstances and life course phases — that precipitated a move into their first occupation working with vulnerable children and young people; and (2) to analyse the main narrative resources that informants employed in explaining how they developed a commitment to care in general. It thereby suggests how workers are drawn to caring and when and why they take up this important work that is generally undervalued in the British context. In particular, it demonstrates how childhood constitutes a critical interpretive resource suggesting the importance of negative as well as positive formative experiences in creating a commitment to care for others, vulnerable children in particular.

Drawing on empirical material from fieldwork among young children living with their families in two Norwegian reception centres for asylum-seekers, this article compares their realities to the norms and realities for other children in Norway. Children’s spatial and social situations within the centres stand out in stark contrast to Norwegian childhood ideology and norms. The authorities explain the divergence in terms of migration management, and the spatiotemporal and social positions of ‘asylum-seekers’ in relation to those of ‘children’ within the nation-state are brought to the fore in the article. The perceived political dilemma between migration control and Norway’s image as a promoter of children’s rights is highlighted, and the authors suggest that the dilemma may be less real than is widely assumed.

Respecting children’s rights to be heard in matters that directly affect their everyday lives has become an established principle in Ireland and internationally. Accessing children’s voices raises a number of important issues for researchers across a wide range of disciplines. This article reflects on the organizational, practical and ethical challenges that arose from a study that investigated hospitalized children’s experiences of consultation and decision-making. The data collection process was hampered by practical and organizational factors, which consequently led to carrying out more individual interviews than focus groups as planned. Some obstacles associated with the hospital environment were practical issues that could be resolved, in contrast to ethical issues such as consent, privacy, access and the role of gatekeepers. The function of gatekeepers generally and in the healthcare setting in relation to accessing children needs to be debated and challenged because children may be silenced and excluded from the opportunity to have their voices heard.