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.…

The latest childhood studies present children's citizenship as a process of engaging in matters related to children themselves in their everyday lives. However, only a few studies have been conducted on what those issues are and what they actually tell about children's citizenship. This study explores the nature of children's participation and…

Recent attempts to theorize children's participation have drawn on a wide range of ideas, concepts and models from political and social theory. The aim of this article is to explore the specific usefulness of Honneth's theory of a "struggle for recognition" in thinking about this area of practice. The article identifies what is distinctive about…

This article reports the results of a study which aimed to examine the development of children's ability to depict loneliness in their drawings. Seventy-eight children and 20 adults took part in the study. Participants were first asked a series of questions assessing their conceptions of loneliness, and were then invited to draw a picture that…

This article explores children's views of responsibility and their position as responsible beings, drawing on an international research project with a focus on data from 109 children in Norway. Responsibility is explored as a practice that children experience as both a privilege and a burden in childhood. It is argued that there is an interwoven…

This article explores children's imaginative representations of time in relation to self-experience. Poems published in a young poets' anthology edited by Naomi Shihab Nye are analyzed in order to discern models of temporality and subjectivity imagined by young writers. A "dynamic temporality" is seen in a subset of poems which manipulate time…

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…

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…

One of the most perplexing aspects of global childhood is how its material culture emerges, circulates, takes on hegemonic traits and becomes contested. Though debates around the impact and nature of globalization have tended to take such artefacts as McDonald's hamburgers and the Islamic veil as signifiers of the possible emergence of a global…

Recent years have brought a dramatic rise in the number of efforts to measure and monitor the status of children. Yet, despite numerous efforts and reports with "Child indicators" in the title, the field of social child indication is fragmented and lacking a unifying taxonomy. The more ambitious the analysis and the more elaborate the statistics,…

The global aim of this study was to explore children's narratives of parental divorce. A convenience sample, composed of 11- and 14-year-old children, was recruited. A total of 22 children (12 male, 10 female) participated in this focus group study. The findings show that two components seem to be really important for children during the divorce…

Scholars agree that aggression among children can lead to a host of delinquency issues that can last into adulthood. Research has found that exposure to violence is one of the strongest predictors of aggressive behaviour and the use of violence. Utilizing a mix of qualitative and quantitative methodologies, the article seeks to determine the…

This article examines how American middle-class children learn and acquire culturally appropriate emotions and sentiments, focusing especially on children's experiences. By analysing children's emotional worlds as well as adult socialization practices, the article shows that children actively reinterpret, reconstruct and reformulate various…

Focusing on the paradox between innocence and responsibility generated by the term child-soldiers, which is treated differently in literary and cinematographic works from the North and the South, this article uses postcolonial theory in order to deconstruct "the single story" that may be erasing these children's many stories.…

This article engages with the current debate in childhood research on children's voices and representation in the research process. In this discussion, the frequent use of drawing techniques in childhood research is often highlighted as especially problematic. While agreeing that there is a need to critically examine the concept of…