Children's rights and active citizenship have been significant policy emphases and developments in recent years but the relationship between the two has not been actively explored in relation to the implications for child poverty. Recent policy developments in New Zealand and Sweden are drawn on here to explore this relationship. The article…

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…

A growing number of empirical studies deal with children's participation in care relationships in the family. Based on a review of empirical findings in the UK and Germany, this article discusses care-giving children in terms of vulnerability and agency. The focus is set on understandings of family life as interdependent and reciprocal…

Children and youth under 18 have made significant strides in recent years toward fuller inclusion in democratic processes. These strides, however, rarely rise to the level of direct political representation, whether in changing policies, making laws, or voting. This article argues that democracies will be able to represent children only by…

In international conventions as well as in the national discourses of many countries, children who do not grow up with their biogenetic parents have the right to receive information about their origin. The meaning of origin in intercountry adoption, however, is not necessarily the same as in artificial donor insemination (AID). Through an analysis…

Acknowledging children as rights-holders has significant implications for research processes. What is distinctive about a children's rights informed approach to research is a focus not only on safe, inclusive and engaging opportunities for children to express their views but also on deliberate strategies to assist children in the formation of…

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.…

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…

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 examines the dynamic interplay between competing meanings of childhood and the social construction of sexual abuse in the Caribbean. Drawing on qualitative data from a study undertaken in six Caribbean countries, the article suggests that Caribbean childhoods are neither wholly global nor local but hybrid creations of the region's…

This article explores a scoping review of qualitative studies about children's experiences and feelings during times of parental separation. The purpose of the review was to explore children's feelings and attitudes about their parents' separation and how their voices are heard during times of parental separation. The scoping review examined 44…

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…

Critiques of child participation within aid programming suggest that it is superficial and insubstantive for the fulfilment of children's rights. By employing former child research participants as youth research assistants, the collaborative research design developed for my research project on the survival strategies of African orphans and…

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 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,…