This article examines expressions of difference and sameness and peer relations among children (aged 5–7) in school. The article concludes that children do not generally relate sameness or difference to their peer relations or to ethnicity or gender. Furthermore, the article demonstrates that the school setting plays a crucial role for children’s peer interactions: The purpose of school activities directs children’s expressions of difference and sameness, and the structures for peer interaction enable some relations and restrict others.
This article draws attention to the way some theoretically driven researchers discuss an insistent need for reframing the ontological and epistemological assumptions in the field of research known as childhood studies. Using a rhetorical approach, I will take a closer look at how their vocabulary is constructed and made credible through an attempt to find a cohesive language applicable in an interdisciplinary discourse. The article points to the paradoxical claim of taking a step away from a modernist way of thinking, while the arguing is based on a modernist approach. In addition, it also highlights constructions of a certain ideal researcher.
Between 2014 and 2019, secondary school pupils from every state school in England were given the opportunity to visit the battlefields of the Western Front as part of the UK government’s flagship educational initiative to mark the centenary of the First World War. Based on empirical research conducted with pupil participants on the First World War Centenary Battlefield Tours Programme, this article explores the processes of militarisation present within these tours as well as the way young people participated in and made sense of these practices.
The co-occurrence of different forms of malnutrition in young children is known to carry differential risks of morbity and mortality. Despite this, there are few, if any, systematic analyses of the prevalence of multiple anthropometric failures (or deficits) in young children under 5. This paper presents the results of the first such an analysis done on data from one of the poorest geographic regions of the world – West and Central Africa. Using data from the demographic and health surveys (DHS) and UNICEF’s Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys (MICS), the paper details the prevalence and patterning of child malnutrition using a combination of conventional measures and the Composite Index of Anthropometric Failure (CIAF) for the period 1990–2015. It shows the advantages of the CIAF indicator for gauging the full extent of malnutrition and the ability of an indicator of ‘Multiple Malnutrition’ to identify children under 5 with higher risk of mortality. It also shows how relatively little progress has been made in reducing the extent of malnutrition and emphasises the importance of tracking progress by looking at both rates and total number of affected children. Malnutrition across the region remains strongly associated with household wealth and education. Poorer, rural households are much more likely to experience malnutition, but the widespread prevalence of poor living conditions in urban areas has the potential to undermine any gains made in reducing malnutrition.
Based on 8 months of ethnographic research, this article focuses on the everyday spatial practices of young children living in collective accommodation for refugees in Berlin. We examine how physical spaces and social relationships are appropriated, affecting the relational agency of children in this restrictive context. Using case study material from three families with limited prospects of permanent residence, we discuss the children’s lived citizenship as enacted – not only symbolically – between the sandpit (as a space for children to act and play as a child) and deportation (as an extreme limit for enacting agency related to refugee status).
Abstract Our understanding of child subjective well-being and how to promote it has improved substantially over the last decade. In relation to the role of education policy in shaping subjective well-being, although valuable research has been conducted, many questions remain unanswered. This paper aims to fill this gap by studying the links between education policy and students’ life satisfaction. We use linear and multilevel regression to analyse PISA 2015 data on 15-year-old students in 33 countries. Our interest is in within society differences and how these vary across societies. We find that (1) there is an association between multiple education policy-relevant factors and students’ life satisfaction, which is particularly prominent –and observed in a larger number of countries- in the domains of family relationships, schoolwork-related anxiety and bullying. Our models explain between one-fifth and one-third of the variation in students’ life satisfaction. Results also indicate that (2) schools may play an important role in shaping students’ life satisfaction. This is supported by evidence that these associations tend to vary by school; by evidence on the existence of school effects in all countries but two; and by the finding that a proportion - substantial in some countries- of the variation in students’ life satisfaction is explained by differences between schools. Finally, we find that (3) in relation to both questions, there are important differences across societies. Overall, these results provide evidence that an association between education policy and children’s subjective well-being seems to exist but is of a complex nature.
This article draws on a co-productive, arts-based study, in Northern Finland, of 40 children from 10 to 11 years of age. Applying Gilles Deleuze’s idea of the virtual , the author maps the journey of the children’s creative activities, as developed through a series of workshops over one academic year. This article demonstrates how repetitive crafting and photographing can accelerate an actualisation of expansive ideas of gender and ‘self-hood’, ideas emerging in manners that disrupt rigid expectations of girlhood and boyhood.
In addition to managing dual cultural identities, children of refugees face the potential burden of living with caregivers struggling in the aftermath of trauma, loss, and adversity. Using an ecological and transactional understanding of child development, this qualitative study explored the subjective experiences of young adults who grew up in a refugee family in Norway. Findings show that parental suffering have affected their daily life and development in different ways. This article elucidates how children of refugees have experienced the relationship with their parents through childhood, adolescence, and into early adulthood, and how they have managed and negotiated developmental tasks, and explored patterns of strategies developed to regulate feelings of relational distress.
Abstract The level of life satisfaction perceived during childhood and adolescence is an excellent indicator of healthy psychological emotional development. The main aim of this work is to study the levels of life satisfaction perceived by young people throughout their childhood and adolescence. To this end, an innovative retrospective approach is adopted that shows how the evolution of life satisfaction is perceived at different ages according to gender. The present study is based on a sample of 600 Spanish adolescents (58.1% girls; mean age = 16.64) who report the evolution of their life satisfaction from 6 years to 18, through the Life Satisfaction Chart (LSCh). The Goldberg Anxiety and Depression Scale (GADS) is also administered to record levels of anxiety and depression. The results indicate no gender differences in terms of life satisfaction during childhood. Levels of life satisfaction are significantly higher in childhood than in pre-adolescence and adolescence and a significant decrease in levels appearing towards the age of 11. As for gender, significant differences in life satisfaction appear from the age of 12, with girls being significantly more dissatisfied, more depressed and more anxious than boys. Current levels of anxiety and depression do not appear to interfere with retrospectively reported levels of life satisfaction throughout the developmental years studied, except among the female population, where minimal interference is detected. Life satisfaction retrospectively reported by young people shows a significant decrease after the age of 11 years, with greater emotional and psychological vulnerability after this age, mainly and notably among girls. The present results highlight the importance of psychological/affective care in the pre-adolescent and adolescent stages, especially among the female population.
Maria Aymerich, Ramón Cladellas, Antoni Castelló et al.
To “make kin, not babies” is what Donna Haraway has recently proposed in response to the so-called “Anthropocene”. Building on other critical engagements with Haraway’s proposal, this paper interrogates it from a childist perspective. While striving towards a “pro-child” position on kinship, Haraway only goes so far in explicating this aim. The paper suggests that challenging adultism as well as attention to children's ongoing kinship practices are required.
