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Purpose – This paper presents a critical exploration of the concept of children's ‘participation’ by looking in more detail at children's right to play and the possibilities this presents for a different understanding of children as political actors.Design/methodology/approach – The paper applies a range of concepts, largely drawn from Deleuzian philosophy and children's geographies, to produce an account of playing that unsettles traditional ways of valuing this behaviour. In doing so, it also extends current approaches to children's participation rights by presenting play as a primary way in which children actively participate in their everyday worlds. Observations of children's play are utilised to illustrate the multiple ways in which moments of playfulness enliven the spaces and routines of children's lives.Findings – Playing may be viewed as micro-political expressions in which children collectively participate to establish temporary control over their immediate environment in order to make things different/better. These everyday acts are largely unnoticed by adults and represent a markedly different form of political engagement from the ways in which children are brought into adult-led political realms. Yet playful moments are a vital expression of children's power and ability to influence the conditions of their lives.Originality/value – Thinking differently about playing offers an opportunity to revitalise the very notion of participation. Such a move marks a line of flight which opens up the possibility for everyday collective acts to disturb dominant ways of accounting for adult–child relationships and by doing so establish moments of hope that people can get on and go on together by co-creating more just and participative spaces of childhood.

This paper reports several findings of a survey on children aged 5–13¹ years focusing on their daily lives. The aim was to test the assumption, claimed in New Childhood Sociology, that children are a generational group so strictly dependent on adult society that they have little autonomy in their daily behaviour. Moreover, although they are a social group that is different from that of adults, they are so diversified internally that it seems more appropriate to speak of diversified childhoods (James, Jenks & Prout, 1998; James & Prout, 1990; Qvortrup, 1991; Hengst & Zeiher, 2004). Our first objective in this paper was therefore to improve the rather scarce knowledge of children's everyday lives in post-industrial Western societies and then to analyse to what extent these were connected with those of adults. Finally, we wished to detect the degree and patterns of differences in the children's lifestyles.

Relationships between adult children and their aging parents are challenged when parents need help or care. As a consequence, adult children often experience a transition in their filial role as older parents experience functional losses and the children have to reorganize and restructure their relationship with them (Lang & Schütze, 2002). This filial task competes with other demands of midlife (such as family and career demands). As a consequence, the filial role in midlife may be associated with contradictory experiences in the relationship with one’s parents, typically entailing a high potential for ambivalence.

Purpose: To explore emotional support, daily housework assistance, and economic support for older adults provided by the Vietnamese family within the context of the impacts of socio-economic, demographic, and other factors.

Methodology: (1) The researchers used data from censuses taken from 1989 to 2019; national surveys of Internal Migration, Labor and Employment and other topics; and recent large sample sociological surveys (2) adapted a modified Diamond Care Model (Ochiai, 2009) to analyze effects of the characteristics of older adults; and of the country’s laws, policies, and socio-economic changes, on the families’ caregiving activities supporting the older adults.

Findings: The family is still the most important institution providing care for older adults in Viet Nam. Most older people live with their children and see this as an age-old security solution despite differences related to lifestyles and interests. However, when the average number of working-age people per older person decreases, as older adults live longer, household sizes are smaller, and there is increased large migration, the demand for non-family caregiving for older adults will increase. Since social services to help meet this demand are limited, the traditional family support system for the elderly in Viet Nam will face many challenges as families try to assure the quality of care needed in the very near future.

Value: This chapter shows systematically a relationship between elderly care in the Vietnamese family and socio-economic, demographic, and associated factors based on comprehensive data sources. The results can help us think about how to create an appropriate future model for taking care of older adults in Viet Nam that combines the efforts of families and the support of comprehensive social policies by the community.

The purpose of this paper is to understand, from children's perspectives, the commercial marketing strategy of selling breakfast cereals with “insert toys” targeted at children.

The study is based on four focus group interviews conducted with 16 children (8‐9 years of age) concerning 18 different breakfast cereal packages. The theoretical framework integrates childhood sociology, critical discourse analysis and talk‐in‐interaction. This theoretical and methodological combination is used to show how children, in local micro settings of talk, make use of the discourses that are available to them to produce and reproduce social and cultural values about marketing with “insert toys”.

The present findings suggest that, from children's perspectives, “insert toys” are constituted by cultural and social patterns extending far beyond the “insert toy” itself. For example, the analysis shows that it is not biological age that defines what and how consumption is understood.

The focus group material provides understandings of marketing strategies and consumption practices from children's perspectives. When the children talk about children and adults, hybrid agents of the “child‐adult”, the “adult‐child” and the “childish child” are constructed. These hybrids contradict research that dichotomizes children and adults likewise children's understandings of consumption based on age stages. Accordingly, age is rationalized into an empirically investigated category rather than being used as a preset category set out to explain children's behaviours.

Analysis of the focus group interactions shows that the way the market and marketing as well as children and adults are talked about is crucial to understanding children's and parents' actions as consumers.

This paper seeks to reconcile society's need to apply strong sanctions to parents who are responsible for the murder of a disabled adult while also recognising the stresses present in their lives.

The paper reviews six cases in which seven disabled adults were killed by a parent in the UK between 1999 and 2009.

The review found that these were no ordinary crimes and nor were they motivated by malice, but occurred against a backdrop of significant mental illness and distress. In addition, two of the parents killed themselves as well as their adult child and another attempted suicide. The explanations offered in court to account for the murders included a combination of caregiver stress and mercy killing and the courts struggled to find a consistent approach.

The review is limited to cases reported in the press and only considers information in the public domain. The portrayal of the issues in the media is integral to the study. The cases reported in this paper are a sub‐set of a larger sample of children and adults murdered by caregivers during this period.

The paper compares and contrasts some features of these high‐profile cases, commenting on the way they were addressed in the courts and making recommendations as to how the backdrop of significant mental ill‐health could be taken into account in the way families are offered support with a view to preventing further tragedies.

The purpose of this study is to compare the evolution of self-reported milk allergy in children and adults within the population of Fez-Meknes region, as well as to investigate the consumption of milk and its correlation to milk allergy.

It is a cross-sectional study conducted in Fez-Meknes region between April 2014 and March 2015 basing on a questionnaire completed by 3,068 children and 1,281 adults.

The results showed that food allergy was more reported among children (29.4 per cent) than adults (16.9 per cent). Milk allergy was reported by 5.3 per cent of children and 4.2 per cent of adults. Children reported mostly cutaneous manifestations (64.8 per cent) while adults reported mostly gastrointestinal manifestations (68.5 per cent). The consumption of milk showed a protective effect against the development of milk allergy (p < 0.001).

The consumption of milk was associated significantly with a low rate of milk allergy, especially in adults. However, the pasteurization of milk seemed to be correlated to increase milk sensitivity.

This paper aims to explore the inverse consumer socialization processes, differences in technology adoption and changes in extended family dynamics occurring between adult children and their middle-aged and elderly parents when technology is consumed.

Six focus groups, segmented into parents (50 to 75 years old) and adult children (18 to 35 years old) and grouped by gender and marital status, were conducted. Research questions examined consumption patterns, technology use, family structure and interactions between parents and adult children when consuming technology.

This study acknowledges different levels of technology adoption coexisting in extended families between adult children, who act as influencers, and their parents, who model their technology consumption after them. It further reveals a limited inverse consumer socialization process, as parents’ resistance to change hinders them from acquiring from their adult children significant knowledge, skills and attitudes regarding new technologies. This process is complicated by frustrations resulting from the parents’ limited ability to learn new technologies and their children’s lack of knowledge regarding andragogy (the art and science of teaching adult learners). Finally, this study reveals intergenerational alterations in extended family dynamics as aging parents depend on their adult children for their expertise with technology and children gain authority in an asymmetrical, two-way process.

This research reveals important limits in the inverse socialization process into technology between adult children and their parents, with attention to its effects on families and society.

This paper aims to examine the differences in the self-reported allergies to food, especially fish and shellfish, between children and adults, and to study the association between fish consumption and self-reported fish and shellfish allergy (FSA) according to age.

This study is based on a survey conducted between April 2014 and December 2016 where children and adults were recruited from the general population of the Fez-Meknes region. The total studied population was 4,046 people.

The results show that the self-reported food allergy (FA) of the general population was more frequent among children (28.2 per cent) than adults (16.8 per cent), in which eggs, fish/shellfish, milk and cereals were the most common food cited. With regard to the self-reported FSA, the authors found a prevalence of 9.5 per cent in both children and adults, whereas fish species allergies were more frequent among adults than children. The most common clinical manifestations observed in this population were cutaneous reactions. The study of the association between fish consumption and FSA shows that people who consumed fish had a lower rate of FSA, especially in adults (p < 0.001).

The self-reported FA of the general population was more pronounced in children than adults. Regarding the self-reported FSA, the authors have shown a prevalence of 9.5 per cent in both children and adults, indicating an important sensitivity of their population to fish and shellfish. The authors have shown that consumption of fish was associated significantly with a lower rate of FSA, especially in adults.