Constructions of rural childhood: challenging dominant perspectives

This article reviews research on the lives and experiences of children and young people living in rural Minority world environments. The literature reviewed has focused on constructions of rurality in relation to children's experiences, most notably the rural idyll. Alternative constructions of rural childhood, characterised by dullness, horror and deprivation, are also apparent, and associated with insufficient rural activities, resources and transport, marginalisation and social exclusion. The more recent inclusion of children's perspectives on rural living provides a deeper understanding of rural childhood and challenges the dominant perspectives.     

After-school Hours and the Meanings of Home: Re-defining Finnish Childhood Space

School children's use of their home during the after-school hours has become a controversial question in Finnish society. The article discusses cultural conceptions and uses of home as a specific space for children by comparing two different sets of empirical data: children's accounts of their after-school spaces and media debate on the same topic. Activated public concern in media accounts is analysed as a process of re-defining the properties of ‘proper places’ for children, whereas children's accounts are interpreted as expressions of local cultures. For the children, home is an ideal place for spending after-school time, while the public debate portrays the home as empty and children as lonely and unsafe. Definitions of home in after-school time are considered as part of a broader cultural process of re-defining contemporary Finnish childhood in which control turns out to be a crucial dimension of children's ‘proper places’.     

Childhood in the shadow of war: filled with work and play

This study was focused on war-time childhood. The target period covers the war years 1939–1945 and the years of post-war reconstruction. The research was based on memories of 13 participants who lived in the countryside in northern Finland during the Second World War. The purpose of the study was to find out what children's everyday life was like during the war. According to the results, children did play regardless of the war situation. Children also participated in household work actively. By highlighting children's experiences and perspectives, this study provided important information about children's survival during war time. The study also helps understanding the effects of wars from children's point of view.     

Childhoods in Shifting Analytical Spaces: Cross-Cultural,Biocultural, and Human Ecological Perspectives

In this article I discuss the variation and possible connections among human ecological, biosocial, and cross-cultural approaches to the anthropology of childhoods. On the basis of this comparison I consider recent analytical innovations in theorizing children's enculturation and socialization, and new research possibilities related to childcare and relatedness. Finally, I address the dimension of power in the study of children as active participants in socialization within their life worlds. Heterogeneity characterizes current childhood studies.     

Walking with preschool‐aged children to explore their local wellbeing affordances

An increasingly well‐developed body of research uses neighbourhood walks to better understand primary school children's experiences of local environments, yet virtually nothing is known about preschool‐aged children's connections to their neighbourhoods. A reason for this omission is the commonly held view that preschool children lack competency to reflect on lived environments beyond playgrounds, kindergartens, and other confined settings that dominate early childhood. However, preliterate children walk around, use, and create intimate relationships with local environments as shown by 10 children aged 3–5 years from Dunedin in New Zealand during go‐along interviews. We asked each to walk us around their locale, explaining and pointing out favourite and less beloved places and activities. In this article, we advance two arguments: first that preschoolers are knowledgeable meaning makers of place; second that walking with them is a key step to understanding their life worlds and provides a way for preliterate and preverbal children to demonstrate knowledge and understanding of their spatial worlds, including as research participants. We challenge the idea that children of this age lack large‐scale spatial competency and understanding. Walking with them generated an in‐depth appreciation of their experiences of environments and revealed deep connections they had with their locales at varied scales. The work enables us to offer novel insights into spatial competency, sociospatial complexities, and the multiple dimensions of young children's wellbeing affordances in urban environments. Such insights are highly relevant for geographers, planners, and others who shape children's urban environments.     

Changing children's geographies

This keynote explores the changing nature of children's geographies as an academic project. It proceeds in four parts. Part 1 considers the shift away from research on children's spatial cognition which envisaged the child in largely biological terms, and contemplates contemporary efforts to rework the nature/culture dualism. Part 2 traces the incorporation of new social studies of childhood into geography, emphasising the importance of children's voices, their positioning within axes of power, and the need for quantitative and qualitative methods. Part 3 explores how feminist research led to interest in parents, educators and other actors/institutions which shape, and are shaped by, children's lives. Part 4 ponders what children's geographies might add to, and learn from, broader interdisciplinary debates, and the benefits and pitfalls of research impact. The conclusion argues that a well-informed appreciation of sub-disciplinary history provides a strong vantage point from which to engage with new ways of thinking.     

Development for Children,or Children for Development? Examining Children's Participation in School‐Led Total Sanitation Programmes

The Community‐Led Total Sanitation (CLTS) approach is said to have radically revolutionized a poorly performing sanitation sector. The claims of CLTS programmes successfully stopping practices of open defecation have only recently begun to be critically reviewed: scholars and practitioners are questioning the sustainability and scrutinizing the participatory nature of this approach. This article builds on these analyses to draw attention to the School‐Led Total Sanitation (SLTS) programme which promotes the role of children as sanitation change agents to ‘trigger’ a shift of behaviour in their peers and elders in school and surrounding environments. The article reviews the active role of children in SLTS in the context of how ‘participation’ is structured in demand‐led sanitation approaches, as well as in relation to children's rights to participation in developmental projects in general. Reviewing the arguments supporting SLTS in practitioner literature and drawing on observations from SLTS case studies in Ghana, the authors notice a significant contradiction in the concept of children's participation as premised in SLTS initiatives and as outlined in the child rights agenda. These findings expose inherent tensions in SLTS between children's rights, participation and the role of children as sanitation change agents. They build on existing critiques of participation as coercion within demand‐led sanitation approaches that have ‘gone global’.     

Imaging Humanitarianism: NGO Identity and the Iconography of Childhood

Abstract: This paper asks how images of children are used by prominent signatories to NGO codes of conduct. The answer is that images of childhood and shared codes of conduct are both means through which development and relief NGOs produce themselves as rights‐based organisations. The iconography of childhood expresses institutional ideals and the key humanitarian values of humanity, neutrality and impartiality, and solidarity. Images of children are useful for NGOs in reinforcing the legitimacy of their ‘emergency’ interventions as well as the very idea of development itself. But the dominant iconography is also inherently paradoxical, as the child image can be read as both a colonial metaphor for the majority world and as a signifier of humanitarian identity. The question then for NGOs using this image in social justice campaigns is whether overtly political accompanying texts can nullify the contradictory subliminal messages that emanate from the iconography of childhood.     

Participation,consultation, confusion: professionals' understandings of children's participation in physical planning

This article discusses how professionals understand the theory and practice of children's participation in physical planning processes. Drawing on group discussions between Swedish professionals we analyse how children's participation is understood and negotiated, and why it is problematic to implement. The participants had difficulties in understanding the difference between participation and consultation, as well as recognising children as social actors with competences. We argue that while Swedish children have a strong position in society, they are excluded from planning processes due to the rigidity of the planning process, neoliberal influences and planners' lack of competence.     

'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.     

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.     

Rethinking conceptualisations of adult-imposed restriction and children's experiences of autonomy in outdoor space

This paper calls for more sensitive understandings of children's experiences of autonomy and restriction in outdoor space. The study with children and adults living in a suburban area of Cape Town, South Africa, suggests that the imposition of adult structure and surveillance on childhood should not be automatically perceived as negative. The children's experiences were more nuanced and must be contextualised with reference to the predominant concern with (in)security in these suburban geographies. The notion of accompanied mobility is then considered to suggest how children's outdoor mobility might be framed as a collective or community responsibility, as opposed to an individualistic concern of parents.     

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.     

Including babies and toddlers: a new model of participation

ABSTRACT

Models relating to the participation of children are often explicitly aimed at facilitating or evaluating participation in decision-making processes on local levels. However, these models often build on hierarchically ordered ‘ladders’ of children’s involvement starting with passive involvement and increasing gradually to highly active engagement. Such models become problematic when designing or evaluating participative activities for young children. On the basis of two ethnographic studies conducted in children’s libraries, we propose an alternative model based on a view of participation as processual rather than definitive. Theoretically, the paper draws mainly on human rights theory as well as on theories and concepts derived from childhood studies such as participation and citizenship. The new model of participation demonstrates how the idea of participation can be operationalized at practical levels to include the very youngest children.     

'Creating a Place to Belong': Girls' and Boys' Hut-building as a Site for Understanding Discourses on Childhood and Generational Relations in a Norwegian Community

The empirical focus of this article is children's huts as a particular place for constructions of identities and peer relations among children in a Norwegian local community. Building huts can be seen as children's construction of special places during childhood. Often these places are seen as secret places, reflecting a separate 'children's culture' developed within a particular microcosm. I argue that the social practices developed among girls and boys are related in complex ways to local cultural practices and the construction of gendered generational relations in the community. The title 'Creating a place to belong' refers not only to children's attachment to particular physical places, but also to children's place within a field of age-related as well as inter-generational relations.     

Home and away: constructing family and childhood in the context of working parenthood

Little is known about children's views and experiences of their parents’ work?life reconciliation and how these are negotiated in everyday family practices. This article examines families' experiences of work?life reconciliation from both children's and parents' perspectives, drawing on a qualitative longitudinal study with 14 families in Scotland. Such experiences have implications for the spatial and temporal construction of family and childhood in the UK, where working parenthood is increasingly the norm.     

Growing up in the shadow of the Second World War: European perspectives

In this Special Issue, the authors explore the various ways in which the Second World War shaped children's experiences in the post-war period. They map the multifaceted interest or non-interest of states all over Europe for children in the years after the war, filter out groups of children who recall that the consequences of the Second World War significantly influenced their childhood, and investigate the childhood policies directed towards them, as well as their childhood experiences and the memories they foster about their childhood. In addition, they have included case studies from Western, Central and Eastern Europe with the aim of sparking a debate as to whether it was only a similar lifecycle that war children in early post-war Europe shared, or if they also had some life experiences in common.     

Councils,consultations and community: rethinking the spaces for children and young people's participation1

The participation of children and young people in decisions that affect them is now mainstream in social and public policy in the UK. Yet for many young people formal participation opportunities are abstracted from everyday lives and concerns. Children may not feel empowered despite the existence of formal structures for participation. This raises questions about how ‘spaces’ for participation are constructed. This paper critiques prevailing models of participation in formal structures and instead, argues for the need to rethink children's participation as a more diverse set of social processes rooted in everyday environments and interactions.     

Changes in children's nature-based experiences near home: from spontaneous play to adult-controlled,planned and organised activities

A qualitative case study from Brumunddalen, Norway, indicates that children's use of nature areas near their homes have changed substantially from being spontaneous and self-initiated to being part of planned, organised and adult-controlled activities. This study explores the association between changes in outdoor play and wider patterns of change in childhood today, as increasing amounts of play time is spent in institutions and organised activities, or occupied by computer and internet usage. The paper discusses these effects in terms of social relations as well as children's identity formation. The subject was investigated through adults' memories of their own childhood and their observations of children's practices.     

The place of children among the Guji of southern Ethiopia: school,work and play

This article explores everyday life among Guji children in southern Ethiopia and the place of children in an intergenerational social order. Based on data generated through ethnographic fieldwork among the Guji, we show that work, school and play are significant and intertwined social practices. Local knowledge and skills of importance for sustainable livelihood are acquired through children's participation in these different social practices. Oral tradition represents a key element of local knowledge and social practices in everyday life. However, political and social changes, such as settlement policies and the introduction of schools, affect the dynamic interconnectedness of these practices, as well as relations between different generations. These changes also have implications for local knowledge and local livelihoods.