Values and assumptions underpinning policy for children and young people in England

This paper provides an account of current ideas about English childhood that seem to underpin policies ‘for’ children. New Labour values the future adulthood of children more than their childhoods, and stresses children's responsibilities over their rights. Generally, child protection and provision for children has higher status than children's participation. Children are excluded from participation in social life. Traditional psychological formulations remain powerful in their stress on childhood as a preparatory stage of life, where children are socialised into conformity with the norms of social life. However, the last 15 years have seen greater respect for children's own views and experiences, for their rights and for the idea that childhood is socially constructed. But the idea that children are contributors to society is still rarely recognised and they continue to suffer from low social status accordingly.     

Why does child trafficking policy need to be reformed? The moral economy of children's movement in Benin and Ethiopia

This paper challenges policy discourses that frame children's independent movement as intrinsically exploitative and threatening to their development. Drawing on research with children and adults in Benin and Ethiopia, two countries caught up in current efforts to eradicate child migration and the trafficking with which it has become associated, the paper critiques assumptions about children's vulnerability and physical dependence and contests the idea that appropriate childhood is necessarily fixed spatially within stable family structures. It, thus, situates children's migration within socio-cultural and economic contexts and suggests that it should be understood as part of a moral economy that confounds simplistic paradigms that conflate migration with trafficking. Policy suggestions are offered for how best to secure children's well-being through acknowledgement of the important relationship between mobility and child maturation.     

Renegotiating the Primary School: Children's Emotional Geographies of Sport,Exercise and Active Play

The current UK policy concern with children's health has led to primary school practices of sport, exercise and active play aimed, in particular, at constructing children's bodies as ‘healthy’. Qualitative explorations of children's own values and experiences however, reveal that their understandings of sport in school differ considerably from its potential to be healthy, instead emphasising emotional geographies of pleasure and enjoyment. This article aims to develop a better understanding of children's ability to modify and reconstitute discursive corporeal regimes through their own agency, thus highlighting the fluid nature of the primary school as an institution. Adult discourses and children's bodily challenges to these mingle and intersect, creating spaces of competing values and discourses that work to transform and renegotiate the primary school. Although this article focuses particularly on the UK context, the findings will be relevant for any country in which child obesity is of current concern for social and education policy.     

Global standards and deficit childhoods: the contested meaning of children's participation

In recent years a discursive voice-based form of children's participation has become a global standard. This has rendered more material children's practices particularly in less-affluent regions as deviant forms of participation. Drawing on the case of child labour, I critically examine the dominance of a discursive model of participation in terms of international policy statements. I argue for a more inclusive notion of children's participation incorporating children's economic as well as discursive contributions within their families, communities and schools. At the same time a more nuanced view potentially shifts the policy focus towards the legitimation of child labour rather than its condemnation.     

Rethinking ‘trafficking’ in children's migratory processes: the role of social networks in child labour migration in Bangladesh

Although the academic and policy literature on children's migration is growing, an in-depth look of the operationalisation of networks in child labour migration is missing. The focus of policy-makers on human trafficking draws attention to children's vulnerability and their exploitation at the hands of traffickers. In the absence of research focusing on children's migration more broadly, this emphasis on trafficking risks misreading children's migratory processes. Ethnographic research undertaken in Bangladesh shows that while some exploitation may occur, it co-exists alongside gendered relations of protection. This draws attention to the need for more in-depth examination of children's networks in migration.     

‘In the best interests of the child’: juggling the geography of children's gardens (between adult agendas and children's needs)

This review paper presents literature, particularly in children's geographies, in support of the proposition that the rationales for the current children's garden movement flourishing particularly in the United States, albeit well-intentioned, continue to be dominated by adult discourses acting ‘in the best interests of the child’. The paper concludes that broadening the debate on ‘children and gardens’ through inclusion of research that focuses on children's competence and empowerment offers a different perspective of what children might want from these spaces. This highlights new directions for research on children's gardens which would focus this garden typology more on children's needs than adult agendas, and therefore contribute positively to development of these gardens as sustainable environments for children's learning and enjoyment of nature.     

It all used to be better? Different generations on continuity and change in urban children's daily use of space

There is much speculation about children's changing space–time behaviour, yet little is actually known about it. The study reported on here, which was based on oral histories, statistical and archive research, and observations in Amsterdam, compared children's use of space during the 1950s and early 1960s with that of today. The public space of the street used to be a child space, but in two of the three streets studied it has been transformed into an adult space. Conversely, private home space—traditionally the domain of adults—has become a child space. Over time, children's geographies have become more diverse. In addition to the traditional childhood of outdoor children, we distinguish indoor children and children of the backseat generation. These two new types are characterized by a decrease in playing outdoors and an increase in adult supervision. Although this may be regarded as a loss, new children's activities have emerged, outdoors as well as indoors. Contemporary cities can be exciting places for children, but it is clear that inequality by class has become more manifest. Both new geographical childhoods have resulted in a decrease in children's agency, which may have a negative impact on segregation patterns.     

Mortality Trends in Massachusetts Before 1860

The debate over whether turn-of-the-century immigrants were influenced more by their cultural heritage or by their socioeconomic circumstances when deciding to send their children either to school or to work, serves to illustrate the interplay between theory and evidence in the research process. The authors examine how ethnicity, the local economy, and the family economy affected children's participation in school and work. Using cost-of-living data from 1888-1890, they find that the effects of ethnicity on children's school participation were attenuated by local and family economy factors, and in some cases ethnic group coefficients no longer differed significantly from those of Yankees. The significant effects of ethnicity on children's work participation, however, persisted even when local and family economy factors were taken into consideration.     

'My Son's a Bit Dizzy.' 'My Wife's a Bit Soft': Gender,children and cultures of parenting

What it means to be a child and what it means to be a parent are both cultural inventions, ideologies which are (re)constructed and (re)produced over time. The two are deeply intertwined. The dominant contemporary Western imagining of children as vulnerable and incompetent in public space contributes towards structuring the way that parents look after their offspring and determine their children's personal geographies. Children's safety in public space from traffic accidents and stranger-dangers is an issue that is high on the public agenda in the USA and UK, heightening parental anxieties about the amount of independence and spatial freedom they should grant their offspring. Mothers' and fathers' understandings of their children's safety and the culture and conduct of parenting are gendered processes. This paper therefore explores how parents' attitudes towards girls' and boys' respective vulnerabilities and competencies to handle danger in public space vary. It then goes on to consider the way that parental practices, such as taking responsibility for managing children's spatial boundaries and disciplining them for any infringements, are also gendered.     

Struggling with child domestic work: what can a postcolonial perspective offer?

Majority World working children's voices have attained some prominence in debates over their well-being. Many have defended their right to work, challenging Minority World understandings of children's ‘best’ interests. Yet employers' voices remain sidelined, raising questions over the extent to which the discursive and material spaces of children's work have been decolonised. A postcolonial perspective on children's work challenges suggestions that Majority World adults (and societies) need western guidance on how children ought to be raised. It also creates opportunities to look beyond western discourses of economic exploitation, to the potential for more-than-economic relationships between working children and their employers.     

Local Childcare Cultures: Moral geographies of mothering and the social organisation of pre-school education

Child-rearing has not been a major focus of research in geography despite the fact that its organisation is both spatially and temporally variable. Geographical work on pre-school childcare provision in the 1970s and 1980s tended to focus on the implementation and implications of government policy; more recently there has been a growth of feminist work on child-rearing which has employed a diversity of approaches. These studies have made a valuable contribution to our understanding of how mothers organise the care of their children, often whilst undertaking paid employment; nevertheless they can not always explain how a wide range of mothers negotiate specific aspects of 'maternal responsibility'. This article draws on an empirical investigation of pre-school childcare cultures in two areas of Sheffield, UK, in order to analyse the ways in which mothers' attitudes to their children's educational development and their strategies for accessing non-parental educational care are jointly shaped within the context of different local childcare cultures. The importance of two key components of these local childcare cultures, the moral geographies of mothering and the local social organisation of non-parental educational care, is emphasised.     

Children's involvement in policy formation

Involving children in policy is now popular, a recent UK example being the consultation on Every Child Matters. This can be viewed as progress in increasing children's status as stakeholders in policy formation. However, questions remain about the reality of children's engagement and the validity of the methods used to gather, analyse and present their views. We need to protect children from exploitative or tokenistic processes and differentiate between gathering children's views and involving them as partners in policy formation. The former requires greater rigour of methodology. The latter requires moving from short term policy development to a longer term shared engagement enabling powerful adults and children to think collaboratively.     

'It's only as stupid as you are': Children's and adults' negotiation of ICT competence at home and at school

Contemporary discourses about children's use of information and communication technologies (ICT)—which both celebrate children's command of a technology which is seen to be our future, and raise fears that this technology is putting children's emotional well-being at risk—are problematic, resting as they do on essentialist ideas about children, and overt technological determinism. Drawing instead on work within the new social studies of childhood, and the sociology of science and technology, we identify a need for research which examines how children and technology come together in diverse communities of practice. The communities of practice we study are the home- and school-based ICT usage of British school children in the late 1990s. Our research identifies the different ways in which children and adults negotiate children's technical and emotional competence in relation to ICT, and uncovers the varied meanings of childhood and technology which emerge for adults and children in these two socio-spatial environments. These findings not only highlight the spatiality of children's and adults' performances and understandings of ICT competence, but also how these are constituted through the socio-spatial relations which shape the off-line spaces of home and school.     

VIEWPOINTS

This paper reviews plans for a new building programme for Amsterdam, a growing city in the Netherlands. This plan ignores children's needs and 'devoires' responsibility to the boroughs. This is alarming as the boroughs are not addressing threats to the quality of children's neighbourhood lives. It is argued that this neglect will undermine Amsterdam's reputation as a child friendly city by design. There is an urgent need to make children's presence more visible, to set minimum space standards and to involve children in the planning process.     

Spatial extensions of childhood: from toy worlds to online communities

Digital technologies offer children opportunities to expand their everyday worlds and manipulate their spatial surroundings in real time. This article draws from ethnographic research in Helsinki focusing on children's sociality and technology encounters. Particular attention is given to techno-toys and online networking communities. Connections between companies developing digital technologies and children's everyday spaces give rise to new generational involvements. Adult-designed technologies support and exploit children's mutual relations, create opportunities for these relations, and are aimed at directing their course. Consequently, the fascination with commercial spaces is not surprising: they appeal to children by supporting their aims. The article suggests that in order to understand emerging techno-worlds that arrange, extend, and transform children's everyday doings, childhood scholars need to learn to ask questions that go beyond either/or stands. Only through a detailed understanding of the ways in which corporate offerings participate in, and promote, the production of everyday spaces for children can adults efficiently guide the very complex ways in which such spaces influence children.     

Children,Work and ‘Child Labour’: Changing Responses to the Employment of Children

This article examines the ways in which the problem of child labour has been perceived and addressed, from the beginnings of social concern about these issues until the present, with illustrations from The Netherlands and Indonesia. National and international responses to the problem of child labour reflect a number of assumptions which are almost completely at odds with the views and the preferences of children themselves. Paradoxically, powerful lobbies in some of the world's wealthiest countries – which cannot enforce, and in some cases are beginning to relax, their own child labour laws – are trying to insist that the developing countries tighten and/or enforce their laws, under the threat of various forms of sanction or boycott. These increasingly active threats make it highly inadvisable for any exporting country to acknowledge the existence of children's employment at all, for example by protective legislation or other efforts to promote the improvement of children's working conditions.     

Smoking bans for private vehicles: children's rights and children's voices

Smoking bans have recently expanded to private vehicles in which children are present. This study considers the place of children's rights and children's voices in this policy initiative, with respect to the Canadian context, where vehicular smoking bans have been widely adopted. First, we examine print media reports, finding children's right to health was acknowledged less frequently than an array of competing adult rights. Children's voices were largely absent from the record. Second, we report on focus groups involving 23 young people in Edmonton, Alberta, highlighting participants' strong support for bans, based on their knowledge of health harms, aversion to smoke, and awareness that children have limited ability to contest adult authority in vehicles. We conclude that vehicular smoking bans may address the situation whereby children are forced to share an unhealthy environment, in breach of their rights.     

‘It's for the best’: child movement in search of health in Njabini,Kenya

Previous studies produced on the movement of individuals with HIV/AIDS for the obtainment of medical services have rarely been conducted in the Global South and have neglected the experiences of child patients. This article presents a new type of travel for medical care, where HIV+ children in Kenya are being placed or choose to be placed in orphanages in order to obtain constant access to antiretroviral (ARV) therapy, proper nutrition, and education. Through participant observation and photo-elicitation interviews with children in orphanages and their immediate family members in the surrounding Njabini community, this study focused on documenting children's agency in influencing movement decisions to orphanages for better health outcomes. Photo-elicitation interviews in particular allowed for greater insight into children's lives, their motivations for moving to an orphanage, and as a tool to facilitate discussion. Qualitative methods utilized with family members similarly privileged their interpretations of how child movement out of the house would help achieve the ‘best’ possible future for their children, particularly those living with HIV. Study findings shed light on the active role played by children in decisions to move to orphanages, the visualization of these facilities as the best place to secure access to ARV therapy and ensure proper child health, and the interaction that continues to take place between children and their family members once they enter these spaces.     

Making meaningful space for oneself: photo-based dialogue with siblings of refugee children with severe withdrawal symptoms

The current study explores the use of children's photographs to establish a dialogue about everyday life with healthy siblings of refugee children with severe withdrawal symptoms (SWS). Asylum-seeking refugee children in Sweden with SWS have been officially observed since 2000, yet research has overlooked their healthy siblings. We studied three healthy siblings and found photography to be an applicable communicative tool. When parents focus their attention on the ill child, the healthy children create space for themselves and indicate both resilience and vulnerability. We suggest that, together with a dialogue, children's own photographs are useful for research with refugee children in vulnerable situations.     

‘I might know when I'm an adult’: making sense of children's relationships with nature

This paper reports subjective experiences in nature of 5 children aged 6–10 years collected during a 5-day camp in a botanical garden. Creative expressive visual methods and semi-structured interviews were used to collect data. Inductive analysis produced the follow themes: children being positioned to take care of nature and to be taken care of by nature, as well as nature needing protection from children and children needing protection from nature. The roles of gatekeepers in mediating attraction to and repulsion from nature were also highlighted. We examine these in the context of socio-cultural constraints and invitations that children experience in developing these relationships. These themes are discussed using a theoretical framework that blends Vygotsky's socio-cultural development theory with Gibson's theory of affordances. Findings contribute to a more integrated understanding of how ecological psychology and social psychology can inform our understanding of children's relationships with nature; in particular, how children's experiences with nature are mediated by socio-cultural factors. By adding to our understanding of how children develop relationships with nature, practitioners can more effectively facilitate experiences that encourage pro-environmental and stewardship attitudes and behaviors as well as result in positive health and development outcomes for children. This paper contributes to the children's geographies literature by strengthening the theoretical foundation from which geographers approach child–nature relationships.