This article responds to Wright and Nelson's (1995) call for a "creative synthesis" of participant observation and participatory research, which may allow the limitations of both methods to be addressed. It does so by reflecting on the experience of doing long-term research both with and on young Bhutanese refugees in Nepal. Although…

These research notes look at the differing ways in which the basis for including a criterion regarding children's opinions in disputed custody and visitation processes, in the US as compared with Sweden, impacts on the role and place that children's opinions and wishes will have on the process. Sweden's rationale for including children's…

Long before the earthquake in Haiti on 12 January 2010, but particularly since, international media and humanitarian groups have drawn attention to the "vulnerable child" in Haiti, a child often portrayed as needing "saving". Focusing in particular on the "restavek" (child domestic laborer), this article first…

This article analyses child development "as text" to highlight newly emerging contemporary tropes of northern, normalized childhoods in relation to gender, racialization and familial organization. A recent UK marketing campaign for the washing powder Persil is analysed for the ways it mobilizes discourses of childhood and child rights.…

Recent years have seen increasing attention being paid to unaccompanied asylum-seeking children. This article provides an overview of research in the field and its implications for an understanding of these children as a particularly vulnerable category. The existing research focuses primarily on investigating the children's emotional well-being…

Over the last few decades, the role of children in conversations about post-divorce arrangements has become more prominent. Children are approached as active participants in the (post-)divorce process rather than just victims of matrimonial and post-matrimonial discord. In accordance with the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, children have…

Since the early 1990s, liberal welfare regimes have begun to treat lone parents as workers rather than as carers. This has happened in conjunction with an ongoing "moral panic" about the need to develop policies to invest in children, and to protect them from adult worlds. The purpose of this article is to analyse contradictions within…

This article discusses how the new paradigm of children's participation rights and competence has maintained unchallenged the subjectivity considered apt to be included as an opinion giver in the polity. "Developmentalism" continues to feed as a theoretical input and a practical regulation of adult-children relationships. The article,…

This article presents the perspectives of Australian and English children on the broad terms worry, happy and change. Utilizing a qualitative methodology, the study engaged with pre-adolescent children ("tweens") on the issues affecting them in the modern world. Participants were drawn from a large regional secondary school in Eastern…

This article examines the opportunities and obstacles for vulnerable and victimized children's participation in family law proceedings. With the help of a set of interviews with children, a framework for the analysis of vulnerable and victimized children's participation is outlined with reference to, on the one hand, the childhood studies debates…

This article explores the role of children in household livelihoods among the Gedeo ethnic community in Ethiopia. Three themes are discussed--reproductive activities, entrepreneurial work in marketplaces and sociospatial mobility--in the context of recent theoretical debates over children's agency and social competence. With shifts in rural…

This article looks at the application of complexity theory to risk assessment in child protection practice, and how it may help to give a better understanding of risk in relation to protecting vulnerable children. Within the last 20 years increasing use has been made of the term complexity within the natural sciences. In recent times, some of the…

With this year's Global Report on Child Labour, the International Labour Organization (ILO) adopts a stance of victory. With confidence and pride, it announces that "the worldwide movement against child labour" led by the ILO itself has brought "the end of child labour--within reach". However, no convincing proof is given for this surprising…

This article explores isolation in early childhood education settings in the context of historical and current theories of punishment. The authors conclude that although isolation was reinterpreted in the 20th century in relation to changing theories of learning, teaching and child development, its earlier meanings have endured. (Contains 2 notes.)

This article addresses the ambiguity of the child's "voice" in social research. Drawing on a recent research project on young children's communication difficulties, the author argues that the currently popular discourse on "listening to children" is beset with practical and ethical ambiguities that result from the "socialness" of human…