Global Studies of Childhood

In international comparisons, Sweden is one of the countries with the lowest number of children growing up in poverty; its material standard is high, and welfare services are extensive and heavily subsidised. How child poverty can be understood in that context is interrogated in the article. The point of departure for the discussion is Swedish Save the Children’s 2013 anti-poverty campaign Fattigskolan [Poverty School]. The campaign presents child poverty from the vantage point of a welfare state and is informative for understanding normative discourses on childhood. Childhood is investigated as a social imagination that both structures children’s and parents’ everyday lives and organises society. It is argued that the dominant social imagination is based on a middle-class fantasy permeating the organisation of the welfare state. The elements of this fantasy are critical to understanding child poverty.

Although the modern Western concept of childhood is rapidly disappearing in the age of late modernity, this study asserts that childhood (as it is lived) has not disappeared but has been transformed. An integrated approach to childhood is employed in order to go beyond binary oppositions such as the Global North versus the Global South and/or childhood versus childhoods. It is argued that children while constructing their childhoods are confronted with processes of individualisation and globalisation through which new forms of adultization have emerged as concepts of ‘child consumerism’ and ‘child citizenship’. Beyond the opposing views involving the disappearance of childhood or its liberation, this study concludes that the concept of adultization can be used to problematise and analyse childhood in its current state.

School Age Care is a setting that is little researched and the research that has been conducted has not often sought the perspectives of older children. This article describes a participatory and ethnographic research project that sought a deeper insight into older children’s experiences of an Australian School Age Care setting, seeking their views about how to successfully program for other children their age. Older children in School Age Care are commonly spoken of as rebellious, bored, disruptive and unsuited to School Age Care. The Foucauldian theories underpinning the research challenged the normative developmental discourses that circulate School Age Care. The research shows that older children have access to these developmental and maturational discourses. The participants actively engaged with language, architecture and resources in the School Age Care setting to actively construct themselves as a more mature, distinct category of child. The findings suggest that School Age Care practitioners should be aware of how developmental discourses are both enacted by children and reinforced through programming design and consider the impacts of segregating routines and practices on children’s play and leisure. While this research does not ‘solve’ the question of older children in School Age Care, it unsettles dominant understandings, therefore inviting practitioners to imagine new programming approaches that might improve School Age Care for older children.

Working with stories of children’s relationships with place and technologies from an early childhood education pedagogical inquiry research project in Melbourne, Australia and Victoria, Canada, this article takes up the concept of “pedagogical intentions” to consider how educators and researchers might cultivate intentional teaching practices relevant to the complex worlds we inherit with children. We think with a common worlds pedagogies approach to extend conceptualizations of intentional teaching held in dominant Euro-Western early learning frameworks in Melbourne and Victoria. After situating our understanding of pedagogical intentionality as an ongoing, purposeful, answerable practice of shaping and caring with everyday pedagogical relationships, we share three stories of how we activate our Donna Haraway–inspired intentions with children. By questioning how our pedagogical intentions inform our work, we assert that sharing and putting at risk our intentions is a necessary practice for thinking collectively with children, more-than-human others, and technologies within early childhood education.

This article describes an international classroom partnership with twenty-eight 5-to 7-year-old Canadian and Tanzanian children, and outlines the meaningful ways they were involved in the research process. In this project, the children shared their valued school-based experiences and environments through multiple self-chosen modes. The children’s arts-based multimodal texts, descriptions of their valued school experiences and environments, and their personal biographies were then shared at a 2-week exhibit at a national art gallery in Canada. The findings across both data sets revealed the children’s interest in spending time outdoors in their local contexts, engaging in collaborative and imaginative play. This project also addresses the importance of providing a space for children to share their perspectives, which aligns with Article 12 of the UN Convention on the Rights of Child. Article 12 addresses the importance of children having a right to have a voice and to have their opinions heard in matters that affect them. Article 13 is also highlighted in this project and outlines children’s right to freedom of expression. This right includes the freedom ‘to seek, receive, and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers, either orally, in writing or in print, in the form of art, or through any other media of the child’s choice’. In this project, the Canadian and Tanzanian children’s multimodal texts of their valued school-based experiences revealed more similarities than differences in relation to what learning experiences mattered to them at school. During this project, the children in both contexts became interested and invested in their international peers’ lives and school-based experiences, and felt a sense of connectedness and kinship across the globe.

Adolescent problems in Hong Kong have brought questions about their moral development and mental health to light. Moral education for preschool children will be strategically important to address these issues because applying early educational interventions to preschool children will effectively enhance their personal development. This article highlights the inadequacy of the Hong Kong preschool curriculum guides in the promotion of moral development in children. The lack of a consensus about the values and character that preschool children should develop is a fundamental problem of implementing preschool moral education in Hong Kong. If moral education is regarded as a school curriculum, either formal or informal, the objectives, content and assessment should be closely adhered to one another. In addition, the learning and teaching activities should also be in line with student’s developmental characteristics and experiences. The O-C-A model is then proposed for moral education in the preschool settings of Hong Kong. Advice has also been made for the promotion of moral education in Hong Kong’s early childhood settings.

This article contributes to a growing debate within the field of early childhood education about the concept of ‘belonging’. It continues from earlier discussions that commented on the adoption of Belonging as a key term in the development of a national curriculum for the early years in Australia in 2009, as well as increasingly common references to belonging in various aspects of debate within the field. The article focuses specifically on the idea of belonging as it has emerged within existentialist philosophy in the 20th century, and more recent post-structuralist theories, especially the work of Jacques Derrida. The article ties belonging to language as a means of redefining approaches in early childhood education to the notions of place and context, so as to more rigorously connect ‘belonging’ to the philosophical debates of the 21st century.

In this article, we bring to the foreground an understudied dimension of working children’s lives in the Global South: their access to money and the consumption this facilitates. Drawing on life history interviews, we show that among the Gamo weavers of Ethiopia, the modern phenomenon of a monetised childhood is at least six decades old and an element of the informal apprenticeships through which Gamo children learn to weave. Qualitative research with young weavers shows that both girls and boys become involved in weaving. Yet the amount of senbeta misa money they receive differs substantially, fuelling distinctly different consumption practices and reinforcing broader gender relations. Zooming in on boys’ monetised leisure activities, we furthermore argue that through consumption belonging to age-based, ethnic peer groups is realised. Moreover, while the monetisation of leisure is shaped by globalisation and market forces, we show that boys and young men themselves also actively contribute to the monetisation of their leisure activities and thereby transform the nature of play.

Africa’s emerging leadership is made up of young people who have energy, passion, and vision for the continent. Harnessed well, this passion and energy will ensure African countries will be able to benefit from an array of human capital that can take the early childhood development agenda on the continent forward. But many challenges stand in the way of the emerging young leadership – and it is essential that we give our children and youth the tools to overcome them. Early Childhood Development is a pillar and tool that can assist young leaders to pick up their role in the development of their nations and continent. Early investments in young children through early childhood development programmes that support a strong start and foundation have been proven to be cost-effective. As the continent boasts of a young population, how prepared are the youth to lead in early childhood development in the future that lies ahead? It is essential that young people be a central and active pillar in the continents development agenda and participate in early childhood development. For the transformation and development process of the continent to forge ahead, leadership capacity promotion in early childhood development must be a priority to help create a secure, prosperous, and peaceful continent. The author highlights some capacity promotion initiatives that he has participated in and the role they have played in building leadership capacity in early childhood development.

This study had as its aim to analyze the thoughts of Javanese–Indonesian and Sundanese–Indonesian children in Indonesia, about their aspirations for the future. In total, 271 Javanese–Indonesian and Sundanese–Indonesian children (aged 4–6) participated. The children were also asked: “what expectations of yours make you happiest?” The results revealed three categories ranging from the most mentioned to the least: aspirations for material issues, expressing doubts about their future aspirations, and wanting to do well in school performance. The results revealed that there was a statistically significant association between children’s ethnic background and their aspirations (χ(1) = 10.089, p = .006). This study offers new ways of thinking in examining young children’s aspirations with regard to ethnicity issues. As aspiring to having successful material issues were the most mentioned by students, as opposed to wanting to do well in school performance, the government should consequently conduct campaigns to build awareness among educators (both teachers and parents) that the purpose of education is to stimulate hopefulness (having aspirations for future).