Childhood marginalization is the result of complicated processes that appears difficult to address for policymakers worldwide. Neo-institutional theory enables studies of the complexity of educational organizations, showing how they evolve in responses to their contradictory surroundings and generate unintended social inequality. Three Nordic…

Research ethics committees (RECs) have a crucial role in protecting children in research. However, studies on REC members' perspectives on paediatric research are scarce. We conducted a qualitative study to explore Swedish scientific REC members' perspectives on ethical aspects in applications involving children with severe health conditions. The…

The aim of this article is to examine contemporary conceptualizations of cultural and linguistic diversity in the Swedish policy for early childhood education and care (ECEC). The analysis draws on in-depth interviews with high-level policy actors and the analysis of documentary material. Using the concepts of interculturality and hybridity as…

Parental capacity is one of the main aspects assessed by social workers as part of child protection investigations. The aim of this study is to explore the social workers' perceptions of assessing the parental capacity of parents with intellectual disabilities in child protection investigations. Four focus group interviews were conducted with…

Few Nordic studies put children's experiences of social inequality at their centre. This article explores the children's perceptions of their education and well-being within two Nordic cities. The participants in this cross-national comparative qualitative study are children living in polarised urban metropolitan areas in Norway and Sweden. Our…

The framing of news promotes certain interpretations. The representation of a problem in public media thereby affects the idea of what to do about that problem. This article analyses discourses about child sexual abuse (CSA) in preschools, occurring in Swedish printed media 2014-2015, and interprets the effects that the discourses may have on the…

Background: Children are provided with food at school in various ways. In Sweden, free school lunches are provided to all children of compulsory school age. Internationally, Sweden is fairly unique in this sense, which makes the country an important example to study and reflect upon. Objective: This article aims to describe the welfare ideology…

Using the metaphors "body" and "voice" and drawing on critical contributions on biopolitics, this article interrogates children's participation rights in a knowledge culture of 'evidencing'. With child welfare and protection practice as an empirical example, I analyse written assessment reports from a Swedish child welfare…

Background: Young people with learning disabilities are frequently underrepresented in research accounts. This study describes the experiences of young people moving from the care system. Methods: We scoped the English and Swedish literature for first-hand accounts and interviewed four young people with learning disabilities leaving the English…

This study explores how group size influences children's conditions for wellbeing, learning and development in preschool in relation to the intentions in the revised (2010) Swedish preschool curriculum. The study is based on qualitative methods generated from interviews and open-ended questions in a questionnaire. Group size is dependent on three…

Understanding how children experience life in educational settings should be an imperative for educational practitioners, evaluators, and researchers. Listening to children's points of views would facilitate the development of educational settings that meet the needs of children and contribute to their wellbeing and development so that their…

In recent decades, the history of childhood and history of education have gained status as political concerns through the establishment of numerous truth commissions and inquiries into historical institutional child abuse. This article discusses the methodological and ethical dilemmas that arise when writing the history of abused children with the…

The article describes and analyses some preliminary working methods for user involvement in child welfare. The models are based on the results of a national project in Sweden where children and young people have been involved as informants. How experiences and viewpoints from children and young people can be a source of knowledge in child welfare…

Using international data on child well-being and educational attainment, this article compares child well-being in the United States to member countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Multiple measures of child well-being are analyzed, such as material well-being (including poverty, unemployment, and income…

The importance for foster children's well-being of good relations between foster parents and birth parents is a common topic of research. This article aims to contribute to an understanding of how co-parenting by foster parents and birth parents works in everyday life, from both parties' perspectives, whether or not they knew each other…