Conceptions of place: approaching space,children and physical activity

In this paper, we argue that place mapping is useful for approaching children's conception of place and that this is of relevance when designing physical activity interventions. We contend that socio-material factors influence children's perception and use of places, and are crucial to understand in relation to their use of local neighbourhoods for physical activity. A place mapping of children's understandings and everyday use of their local neighbourhood in suburban Copenhagen was conducted with a fifth grade elementary school class. The mapping and subsequent analysis resulted in three categories of relevance to children's conceptions of place; located social experiences, experiences of the unknown, and children's contested spaces. We argue that such knowledge can provide useful information in the development and evaluation of activities that promote physical activity in urban spaces.     

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.     

Family migration decision-making,step-migration and separation: children's experiences in European migrant worker families

Intra-European family migration has extended the realm in which families live and work in Europe. This paper joins a limited number of recent attempts to analyse family migration using a children-in-families approach [Bushin, N. 2009. Researching Family Migration Decision-Making: A Children-in-Families Approach.” Population, Space and Place, 15: 429–443]. In contrast to existing studies on this theme, our focus is on children's migration decision-making, experiences of step-migration and experiences of separation from parents during processes of intra-European family migration. Little is known about children's views and experiences of step-migration and separation from their parent(s) during family migration. Such experiences have implications for the spatial and temporal construction of family and childhood in Europe, where transnational mobility is increasing. This paper discusses children's experiences of separation in two research contexts, Scotland and the Republic of Ireland, to illustrate common features of the phenomena. The paper analyses family relationships relevant to migration decisions and explains their effects on children's agency, as well as on family integrity itself.     

Children's projected political preference: transcending local politics

Traditionally, research on political preference has primarily focused on adults within their local political context. This research attempts to show that the perceived political preference of children is part of their national identity, and encompasses not only local politics but also the global and regional discourse. The present study surveyed 1187 Palestinian adolescents attending school, grades 5–7, in the West Bank to examine whether children's future political party preference is grounded in local/global discourse. The findings revealed a discrepancy between participants' perceptions of the local dominant political party and their projected political party preferences. This research argues that political party preference is facilitated through the transcendence of national identity embedded in children's geopolitical agency. The significance of the findings emphasizes that territorial boundaries are artificial; therefore, children's geopolitical agency is impacted by extraterritorial discourse and is able to transcend the local and regional context into a global politics.     

‘My Journey to School …’: Foregrounding the Meaning of School Journeys and Children's Engagements and Interactions in their Everyday Localities

This paper gives prominence to children's own accounts of school journeys. The characteristics of school journeys in Fife, Scotland are outlined, and the nature of children's school journey experiences discussed. The focus is on children in the latter years of primary school, concentrating mainly on the experiences of those who walk without adult accompaniment on their school journeys. By drawing attention to the meaning of these journeys to children this paper brings to the fore children's active and imaginative engagements in and with their environments. This situates school journeys as an integral part of children's geographies indicative of the regulation of the child's realm and the active part which children play in redefining this.     

Does neighbourhood count in affecting children's journeys to schools?

This study examines two factors affecting children's school journeys – independent mobility and accessible school opportunities. Two time-geography based indicators, the spatial extent of potential path area and the number of weighted school places reachable (labelled OPP), are estimated. Multi-level modelling has been developed to analyse the interplay of individual, household and neighbourhood factors. Hong Kong is used as a case study because the neighbourhood effects on school provision within compact cities have not been well studied. The results show that 30.4% of the children's school journeys were made without adult companions. Half of the children walked to schools. The multi-level analysis suggests that nearly 90% of the variance in both indicators was found at the individual level. Neighbourhood, though not a decisive factor, does have impacts on the number of accessible school choices.     

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.     

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.     

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.     

Geographies of environmental learning: an exploration of children's use of school grounds

There has been limited recent geographic research on children's use of school grounds. This study explores the impact of school grounds on the play behaviours of children in primary schools. It examines the way in which some features of school grounds stimulate more of the type of play that is likely to produce environmental learning. The paper reports on research findings from two primary schools in Canberra, Australia. At each school, multiple research techniques were employed, including behaviour mapping of children's play, interviews with children, and analysis of children's drawings of their school grounds. Children's play in one school displayed high levels of interaction with the natural environment. The paper provides insights on the potential of school grounds as sites for environmental learning.     

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’.     

Children's neighbourhoods,social centres to ‘terra incognita’

Neighbourhoods are changing as people lead more spatially dispersed lives diminishing their local social connections. This paper explores the way children interact with their neighbourhoods to see whether they are still socially connected to their neighbourhoods or leading more spatially dispersed social lives. It reports findings from a study of 92 children aged 9–11 in Dunedin, New Zealand. The study found that while many children did have minimal social contact with their neighbourhood, other children retained strong social connections. Key factors determining children's levels of social connectivity include attendance at the local school, levels of independence, neighbourhood urban form, road density and locally accessible classmates.     

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.     

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.     

Not just growing up,but going on: Materials,Spacings, Bodies,Situations

This paper argues that non-representational theories, relating to materialities, spacings, embodiments and events, are important to children's geographies. In so doing, it suggests in particular that we might engage with the becoming-ness of children's geographies in a number of new ways. This point is made via four (ostensibly banal, everyday) examples: wearing glasses; visiting the local park; being clumsy; and one's first day in school. Through this juxtaposition, the paper insists that children's geographies are and can be complex, mundane, unsettling and thoroughly material-spatial-embodied-evental. In other words, there is more to children's geographies than purely representational or symbolic notions of Growing Up. Rather, it is argued that there is always-already-all-sorts-going-on-…     

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.     

Young people's cartographies of school choice: the urban imaginary and moral panic

A critical geography of school choice illuminates how parental school choice reproduces unequal urban conditions. This paper contributes to this scholarship by arguing that the reproduction of urban spaces is reinforced by the ways the dominant urban imaginary shapes how youths imagine and organise their school options. I draw from the fields of critical geography, school choice, and sociology of moral panic to theorise how children's geographies are informed by the dominant urban imaginary and reconstituted reiteratively by moral anxiety. Through this lens, I analyse ethnographic data collected on school choice policy, along with interviews with 59 youth (ages 11–19) in Vancouver, Canada. My analysis demonstrates that the dominant forms of classed stigmatisation of marginalised urban schools are important to young people's rejection of those schools. My analysis also shows that moral panic and rising fears of violence underwrite the spatial patterns of youth participation in school choice.     

Geographies of migration and relatedness: transmigrancy in open transnational adoptive parenting

Current transnational adoptive parenting is characterized by ambiguous practices of (1) discursively distancing adoptive children from immigrants, while (2) symbolically or actually reconnecting newly constituted families to children's birth countries through charity and culture work. This ambiguity reveals the ubiquity of contradictory and essentialist understandings of categories of familial and national belonging. However, adoptive parents’ strategies for accommodating their children's sense of belonging may also open up space for rethinking care and family building in transnational contexts. Using the case of a Belgian family who adopted a 12-year-old girl from Ethiopia, decided to maintain strong connections with the child's biological family, engage in charity work in Ethiopia and forge strong ties with immigrant communities in Belgium, the article explores how the concept of ‘transmigration’ may further our understanding of identity configurations within adoptive families. Furthermore, this particular case of ‘open’ transnational adoptive parenting testifies to adoptive parents’ efforts to escape from essentialist and exclusionary frameworks and create counter-spaces of multiplicity and transmigrancy in a context of severe social and economic inequality.     

A comparison study of children's independent mobility in England and Australia

We compared independent mobility (freedom to move around the neighbourhood – or similar – without adult accompaniment) among English and Australian schoolchildren. Parents reported mobility licences granted to their children (e.g. allowing them to cross main roads alone) and accompaniment on local trips. Children reported travel mode to school. We examined associations between mobility licences and independent school journeys, and accompaniment on local trips. Among 10–12-year-olds, English children had more licences than Australian children. Mobility licences were directly associated with independent school journeys among primary but not among secondary schoolchildren who travelled further; and inversely associated with parental accompaniment to other destinations. Influences on parental restrictions should be examined to promote children's independent mobility.