Childhood

This interdisciplinary article draws upon human geography to bring fresh new perspectives to the relationship between two commonly conflated concepts: ‘childhood’ and ‘nature’. Childhood studies scholars have gone a long way towards retheorizing childhood beyond the ‘natural’ and the ‘universal’ by pointing to its historical and cultural construction. However, as yet, not enough attention has been paid to childhood’s key collateral term, nature. This article seeks to redress this gap by drawing upon interesting retheorizings of nature that have taken place within human geography in order to suggest new ways of reconceptualizing childhood.

Focusing on the paradox between innocence and responsibility generated by the term child-soldiers, which is treated differently in literary and cinematographic works from the North and the South, this article uses postcolonial theory in order to deconstruct ‘the single story’ that may be erasing these children’s many stories. Accordingly, the analysis brings to the fore both the supposed universality of a hegemonic notion of childhood, revealing it as a regulatory discourse which produces diverse subalternities, and the articulation of this notion within an Africanist discourse that legitimizes neocolonial practices in varied domains.

A growing number of empirical studies deal with children’s participation in care relationships in the family. Based on a review of empirical findings in the UK and Germany, this article discusses care-giving children in terms of vulnerability and agency. The focus is set on understandings of family life as interdependent and reciprocal relationships between parents and their minor children. The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and social-political programmes in the UK are analysed with regard to their influence on child carers’ agency and participation as social citizens. The article contributes to a more comprehensive understanding of child carers, and contributes to the development of a theory of care.

Recent years have brought a dramatic rise in the number of efforts to measure and monitor the status of children. Yet, despite numerous efforts and reports with ‘Child indicators’ in the title, the field of social child indication is fragmented and lacking a unifying taxonomy. The more ambitious the analysis and the more elaborate the statistics, the stronger the need for a common language used by all. This article tries to suggest such a taxonomy.

The article presents selected results of a reconstructive study on the significance of the peer group for children’s educational biography. Based on the analysis of qualitative interviews and group discussions with c. 11-year-old children from different educational milieus in Germany it is first shown how, in general, groups of friends in different social contexts exert influence on the children’s school careers. In a second part, the text pursues the question of how children produce social inequality themselves, what processes of distinction they practise and on the basis of which traits and criteria. Thereby the study demonstrates that internal and external distinction practices refer to entirely different concepts of achievement.

The present article approaches the phenomenon of indirect bullying through detailed analysis of the interactional practices that a group of preadolescent girls make use of as they reconstruct the social organization of their peer group, the effect being that one girl is eventually excluded. The data are drawn from ethnography combined with video recordings of the girls’ peer group interactions in a Swedish elementary school, during one school year. The interactional data cover three different periods of the exclusion process. Overall, the study highlights how processes of social exclusion are situated within the flow of subtle and seemingly innocent actions that are embedded in ordinary everyday interactional peer group practices.

The aim of this study was to make visible, and understand, possible opportunities for school improvement based on schoolchildren’s lived experience and visionary ideas of school. Schoolchildren aged 10–12 from the northern part of Sweden participated in the study. The phenomenological analysis resulted in three themes, with no particular order of preference: the school of ‘Friendship and involvement’, the school of ‘Work and play’ and the school of ‘Places and spaces’. The comprehensive understanding of the children’s dream school is the school of ‘Friendship, freedom and fun’, which is discussed with school improvement in mind.

In Finland, the policies and practices in early childhood education and care (ECEC) have been characterized by a division into practices and forms of care for children under and over 3 years old. This study analyses the construction of space in the national and local level curricula for the very youngest children. These documents both present ‘child’s best interests’ as age-related, and generalize and distinguish the needs and abilities of the ‘younger’ and the ‘older’ children. At the local level, the space offered for the youngest children is linked to the emphasis on the daycare group as a community of social actors; the youngest ones are seen as inexperienced newcomers, faced with adaptation to the group and its rules.

Over the last few decades, the role of children in conversations about post-divorce arrangements has become more prominent. Children are approached as active participants in the (post-)divorce process rather than just victims of matrimonial and post-matrimonial discord. In accordance with the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, children have the right to be informed about the procedures and are free to express their opinions. The focus of this study is the conversational position of children in the inquiry by the Dutch Child Protection Board in cases of divorce in which parents cannot reach an agreement about custody and visiting arrangements. This study presents an analysis of the interactions between the Board’s representatives and children, and examines the way the children are informed about procedures, their participatory role and the effects on their disclosures of their ideas and feelings about the events taking place in their family.