Children are disproportionately impacted by direct and indirect effects of climate change. Failure of governments to implement prevention, mitigation and adaptation strategies to address the physical, behavioural and social damage caused by the climate crisis is a violation of children’s rights to life and optimal survival and development. Legal strategies are increasingly being adopted by young people to hold accountable those responsible for such structural violence and violations of rights. These legal strategies, including litigation in regional, national and international courts, demonstrate the importance of providing agency to young people, whose current and future lives will be profoundly impacted by climate change.

"The kids are in charge: activism and power in Peru’s movement of working children." Children's Geographies, 18(3), pp. 376–377

Current international child labour policies emphasise removing children from work rather than improving their well-being. Prohibited 'child labour' extends beyond work shown to be harmful, and work in poorer, majority-world societies is particularly targeted. These policies ignore benefits that children can gain from work, and have been developed largely without the involvement of the children, families and communities most concerned, limiting chances of successful outcomes. This paper argues for alternative approaches, developed in collaboration with children and their communities, focussing on children's well-being and development, and protecting children from harm and exploitation while allowing them to benefit from appropriate work.

This article argues for holistic consideration of children's work. Dominant discourse on child labour attends only to dangers of children's work, leading to policies that damage some children's chances for development. Far from being universally negative in children's lives, appropriate work contributes to their well-being and development, and to transitions to adulthood. Children's work can convey benefits for sustenance and quality of life, provide learning to complement and support school, offer psycho-social benefits, particularly in building self-esteem, and help develop social relations and responsibility. These benefits are especially critical for marginalized children. Common policies of abolishing child labour based on age of employment rather than potential harm deny such benefits to younger children.

While categorisation is fundamental to ordering our experience and knowledge, there is a danger that categories can close enquiry and hinder understanding rather than help it. The category ‘street children’, for example, contains a wide variety of young people, and the streets play different roles in their lives; moreover, the category often carries connotations of delinquency. To provide support for children connected to city streets, we need to enquire what precisely is the role of the streets in their lives. Similarly, a focus on orphanhood in intervention can lead to missing more fundamental sources of vulnerability in children’s lives, such as poverty. A second theme of the chapter is the limitation of survival as a focus for intervention, a focus that often results in missing important elements in young people’s lives, such as hope, love, meaning in life, and effective social relations. Children form strategies to improve their lives rather than for simple survival; indeed, improvement is often the motive pushing young people to work on city streets. The best intervention starts by listening to the children, finding out their hopes and aspirations, and trying to support their efforts to take control over their lives.

Youth unemployment is a world-wide problem, particularly evident in developing countries, where even when economies grow and education systems expand, these are not matched by employment opportunit...

Ina Gankam Tambo , Child Domestic Work in Nigeria: conditions of socialisation and measures of intervention. Münster and New York NY: Waxmann Verlag (pb €39.90 – 978 3 8309 3141 6). 2014, 380 pp. - Volume 87 Issue 2

This chapter presents a more nuanced approach to children's work than what appears in the dominant discourse of abolishing "child labor." In many societies, children's work is seen as a component of attentive child-rearing, conveying benefits for the children with respect both to their immediate well-being and to their future prospects. Work has immediate economic benefits for children and their families, which are especially important in situations of poverty and which are not always confined to the short term. Work can also confer social, psychological, and cognitive benefits that contribute in the longer term to child development and to incorporation into the child's community. Moreover, particularly in situations of poverty, schooling frequently fails to overcome disadvantages of background or to guarantee future security for children. For many children, a combination of work and school provides the best chance of development to their fullest potential.

The symposium was organised by the Young Lives research project, a longitudinal study of children growing up in four countries, with a focus on poverty. Its purpose was to enable policies relating to children and poverty to be firmly based on evidence from children’s lives, rather than on ideology and assumptions. 3 When policy is based on empirical research, it can be adapted to the specific needs of the country and the targeted communities, and to the circumstances, realities, needs and challenges facing the families, and especially the children themselves. Such empirically based policy is more likely to achieve its goals than are generalised policies formulated on the basis of international norms without reference to the specific contexts in which they are to be applied. So two questions for the symposium were: what does research tell us about different forms of child labour and children’s work; and what considerations are specific to the region of East and Southern Africa? A second reason for the symposium was to share experiences of responses to child labour, and to discern best practices that might be applied more broadly in the region. Negative attitudes to children’s work are dominant in the Western world and permeate child-rights and child-protection discourse. There is concern that these attitudes can interfere with African ideals of child rearing, which value work against any kind of idleness, and these negative attitudes can interfere with the responsibility and need of many poor children to contribute to their own livelihood and that of their families, something which they often wish to do. To ensure that intervention improves the lives of …

This book draws together detailed survey and qualitative evidence collected over 10 years about children’s lives between the ages of 5 and 15 and demonstrates how changes and opportunities during middle childhood can affect children’s development and well-being. While the evidence comes from children in four specific countries, it reflects trends typical of other low- and middle-income countries. What does the Young Lives evidence tell us about different groups of children growing up in poverty, and how can we best use that evidence to promote children’s well-being and development? The UN’s High-Level Panel Report (2013) challenges us to keep faith with the original promise of the Millennium Development Goals-we must move, it argues, from trying to reduce poverty to ending poverty and hunger — ‘to leave no one behind’ in securing well-being, human rights, and economic opportunities. But …

Academic researchers on children should not ignore criteria for children's well-being. Starting from the observation that attempts at protection from harmful work has often damaged children's opportunities, the article argues that protection must be broader than simply protection from particular risks, and take in protection of opportunities. Moreover, researchers need to find ways to look beyond material and cognitive development to neglected areas of well-being sometimes referred to as 'spiritual'.

In the year 2000, the United Nations agreed on time-bound Millennium Development Goals to be achieved by 2015. Children are strongly affected by the development agenda, both directly and indirectly. Two of these goals, namely achieving universal primary education and reducing infant mortality, target children directly. Most of the other goals — on maternal health, combating disease, gender equality, and environmental sustainability — have a strong impact on children’s well-being. Goal 1, ‘eradicating extreme poverty and hunger’, is especially signifIcant for children for two main reasons. First, childhood is the most signifIcant period in shaping long-term outcomes in terms of physical, mental, social, and emotional development, when poverty, malnutrition, and limited opportunities for learning can have strong adverse consequences. Inequalities are typically established even before children reach …