This study explores how primary school children make sense of challenging behaviour through arts-based methods. Drawing on the concepts of ‘voice’ and ‘emergent listening’, it shows how children’s trioramas reflect, reproduce, and occasionally resist the grammar of schooling. They also reveal how institutional and political contexts, including geopolitical tensions such as those surrounding Gaza, shape understandings of behaviour in a Flemish classroom. By reframing dominant understandings of challenging behaviour in educational contexts, the study highlights how art-making and emergent listening can create spaces for alternative expressions and meanings. It invites educators to engage with the complexity of children’s lived experiences.
Dominant humanitarian and legal discourses homogenise child soldiers as passive and coerced victims. These narratives obscure the complex ways in which child soldiers navigate conflict. Building on contemporary theories of agency, this article proposes an adaptive conception of agency as a conceptual framework for understanding how children exercise meaningful, though constrained, choices under conditions of oppression. Through analysis of diverse enlistment pathways and relationships to conflict, it argues for a diachronic understanding of agency that recognises both coercion and tactical adaption. Recognising adaptive agency allows for a more sophisticated evaluation of children’s roles in conflict, challenging paternalistic frameworks that silence their voices.
This article considers conceptualisations of play through the lens of street-connected children in Asia (specifically Bangladesh and Nepal). For the young people discussed in this article - children who live on the streets - play forms an important and varied role in their lives. However, play is also inextricably linked to navigating lives and livelihoods, mitigating risk and survival. The article demonstrates how street-connected children face unique challenges in accessing their right to play, including a failure of states to uphold this fundamental human right, the implications of which are discussed.
This article extends the critical turn in participatory research with children by developing critical encounters as a lens to analyse how participation is constituted and constrained in practice. Drawing on two doctoral projects in Belgium, it examines moments of institutional friction, methodological tension, and positional negotiation. These encounters make visible the affective and material relations through which participation unfolds. In dialogue with feminist and decolonial perspectives, the article conceptualises co-research with children as a situated and ethically demanding practice of knowledge-making: one that requires attentiveness to silence, uncertainty, and the societal and institutional structures shaping research relations.
Children's FinTech apps are digital mobile platforms that incorporate features for managing children's financial activities ranging from the setting and tracking of chores, the payment of allowances or pocket money, the capacity for saving and spending, and the facilitation of investment options. As we show in this paper, a key aspect of these child money and finance apps is the inclusion of playful affordances such as gamified interface designs and elements that aim to make financial activities fun and appealing to younger users. In doing so, we build on emerging research on children's FinTech to identify and discuss key implications of playful finance in children's app environments. Methodologically, the paper draws on established app walkthrough and interface design feature analysis methods, as well as a case study approach from app studies, which are applied to children's financial app platforms. We identify various playful affordances such as gamified designs and app features in three case study examples where children are incentivised to complete chores, document their savings goals, embrace debit cards and digital consumption, or learn about money and finances through digital rewards such as points, tokens, or levels. Through the interface design analysis, we find that children's finance apps encourage regular input and collection of their economic activity and information, build attachments to platforms through personalised branding and the accrual of valued in-app assets and status, and instruct children in norms of both digital finance and data surveillance.
Returning to Piaget's original writings reveals that sociologists of childhood still largely ignore the social dimension in his theory of developmental stages. Superficial reading and distorted integration may have been an effect of the disciplinary competition that surrounded the emergence of the sociology of childhood. After reviewing the sociological misunderstandings and reproduced clich & eacute;s about Piaget's conception of development, we restore some of his fundamental contributions to the sociology of childhood and, inspired by this, we propose an alternative vision of agency through the concept of agentivity.
Procedural ethics often proves insufficient for research involving children in vulnerable positions, risking superficial engagement and extractivist practices, and neglecting participant dignity. The article moves beyond compliance, presenting a framework that integrates Kantian deontology and Honneth's recognition theory to ground ethical practice in moral duty and mutual recognition. Synthesising researcher positionality, Kant's categorical imperative, Honneth's practical dimensions of recognition (care, rights, solidarity), and ongoing reflexivity, the article offers a relational approach to navigate fieldwork complexities. The findings emphasise shifting from proceduralism towards participatory methods that foster participant dignity, agency, and solidarity, providing guidance for respectful, transformative ethical decision-making.
The article takes inspiration from childhood studies and child audience research to examine teenage girls' meaning-making of popular female social media influencers' videos in which they advise their followers on mental health issues. Using the methodology ethnography for the internet and analysing girls' reactions to video clips, the study demonstrates that they construct influencers' mental health content both as relatable, authentic experience stories, and as the commodification of mental health. While the girls admire and find support in the influencers, they also adopt a critical stance toward them, their commercial collaborations, and societal phenomena beyond digital platforms.
This article makes a case for using "orphan" as an analytical category in historicizing child rescue in nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries colonial India. It argues that child rescue efforts in the 19th century were tied to the concept of jati, and were therefore largely communitarian in nature. The paper contends that the category of "orphan" provides a fresh perspective on identity formation and community-building, demonstrating how orphans were instrumental not only for the British "civilizing mission" but also for the Indian nation-building efforts. It reveals how the category remains a potent tool for mobilizing communities and shaping public policy in modern India.
This ethnographic study investigates how a fad enters two Swedish school-age educare centers and how the children use it in negotiating social positions. The sports drink Prime is not mainly consumed for its content; instead, the bottles are valued as pop-cultural objects. By regarding the fad as discursive, the results show how children utilize their knowledge of the fad to influence their position in the institutions. The study contributes to knowledge on how fads enter and are translated into children's social contexts, as well as the effects they have on children's social lives in educational institutions.
The article explores how children with migrant backgrounds, placed in foster care, perceive and navigate heritage language maintenance. We analyse qualitative interviews with 14 children and 27 foster carers in Norway and Sweden. Findings indicate that language is significant for children's social identity and opportunities to establish a sense of home, across foster and birth families. Heritage language maintenance, however, may be hindered due to a lack of support. We argue that children's linguistic rights may be strengthened through transforming how language is conceptualized and attended to through welfare practices.
This article offers a Bourdieusian analysis of reading promotion practices aimed at babies. Drawing on ethnographic work, it explores how embodied interactions with books, spatial regulations, and ideals of motherhood intersect in these practices. Using the concepts of habitus and cultural capital, the study reveals how classed norms are inscribed in everyday engagements with books. By focusing on adult interpretations of babies' book-related behavior, the study highlights how symbolic distinctions are drawn even in the earliest stages of life, and how these distinctions are tied to broader structures of class and cultural legitimacy.
This article explores how children who have recently immigrated to Québec, Canada, represent the family. Using the child-centered approach, this qualitative study is based on semi-structured interviews with 43 immigrant children aged 6 to 14 years. The results reveal that children represent the family according to the different functions it plays in their lives, that is, to provide them with security, protection and support, and that their definition of the family is based on the affection and love that unites those who make up the family, shared time and lasting stable ties.
Engaging with the lens of 'children as been, being and becoming', this paper analyses Chinese migrant children's constructions of transnational childhood in Norway, particularly in family context. The study conducted semi-structured interviews with five Chinese families, including children aged 7-14 years old (N = 5) and their parents (N = 9). Findings reveal that Chinese migrant children actively produce meanings of childhood in the migration process, resisting, subverting, and embracing dominant childhood ideals in both Chinese and Norwegian societies. They integrate their past, current, and future experiences and aspirations, constructing (transnational) childhood ideals that matter to them and that are beyond adult-centric.
This study explores power dynamics in Chinese liushou (left-behind) families from the perspective of children. Drawing on 9 months of ethnographic fieldwork in rural Sichuan, it demonstrates that intergenerational authority is reconfigured into a "power triangle" linking migrant parents, co-resident grandparents, and children. Children's agency emerges not only through forms of resistance such as concealment, humouring, and selective compliance, but also through retreat, shaped by guilt, sacrifice, and compassion. The analysis conceptualises power as ambivalent, intimate, and negotiated, offering new insights into how migration reshapes family life and generational orders.
The paper considers the role of parents and the nature of the parent-child relationship. It argues that scholars who have emphasised the agency and independence of children have faced a problem conceptualizing the parental role, since parents can often seem a threat to these ideals. We propose a relational understanding of the parental role, and show how it offers a significant but relationally mediated understanding of children's agency. The paper explores the advantages of this approach for understanding children's lives and the development of their values and personhood.
Important contributions have been made to understanding how screens shape children's lives, but the arrangement of the constitutive components of digitalized childhoods is not yet fully elucidated. This article draws on a mix of methods to map out how the practicalities of digitalized childhoods are induced by logics embedded in the interconnected spaces of the state and parenthood. To this end, assemblage theory is employed to help explore how the digitalization of childhoods unfolds within an arrangement of diverse scales and complexities. The article draws on ongoing debates within childhood studies concerning children's agency and the methodological construction of childhoods.
How do the consideration of very young children's emotions and the pursuit of social conformity interact in upper classes? We conducted interviews with 30 parents of children aged 2 to 3 from these social classes. Two parenting styles emerged. The first group consists of parents who are receptive and permissive toward their children's emotions. The second group consists of parents who place greater importance on child's social performance. However, all the parents exhibite characteristics of both profiles: they all seek to take care of the child's psychology without, at the same time, setting aside its social conformation.
