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It could be argued that the sign of ‘maturity’ of an academic paradigm is when it moves to some kind of integration with existing theories or re-engages with elements which may initially have been perceived as ‘dangerous’ or antithetical to the original demarcation of the area. As with the re-integration of feminism and reproduction, and disability and embodiment, so perhaps also for the social study of childhood and family research. The necessary political emphasis on the agency and voice of the child in the emerging social study of childhood research may well have been overstating the case (Seymour & McNamee, 2012) and ignoring significant structural and generational impediments in children’s relationships and interactions particularly in domestic spaces. To redress this, as occurred with feminist and disability studies, a contemporary standpoint is required which merges an emancipatory agentic approach to the subject of study with conceptual developments from the previously separated substantive area. This chapter will outline the development of the return of children ‘back into the families’ which has occurred in the last decade. It will show how approaches using family practices, personal lives, family display and generagency can be combined with privileging children’s perspectives and voices at home.

This text is the result of an extensive bibliographical research on the development of Childhood Studies in various regions of Brazil based on the understanding that childhood is a social discursive construction, as well as human rights, and both concepts are interlinked when the subject in focus is the children’s rights. According to research data while advances in the concept of childhood have supported specific child protection policies, the issue of marginalization and inequalities affecting children is some of the central matters developed within childhood studies in Brazil. In this article, we map the advances of childhood studies in Brazil and its relation to children’s rights. However, we may state that neither childhood nor children’s rights are still a reality for all Brazilian children, especially when considering other markers that have challenged the rights of our children, such as race, ethnicity, social class, and gender.

Childhood studies is an attractive field for research but presents a number of challenges because it is multi‐disciplinary and eclectic. It offers many opportunities to make connections between mainstream historical, literary, cultural, sociological, educational, and bibliographical studies. As such, it can benefit from novelty and suffer from scholarly credibility over agenda and methodology. At its best, it sheds light on the cultural crosscurrents and assumptions of its time, and helps library professionals better understand their work with children.

This paper recovers some theoretical elements of the sociology of childhood in the Anglo-Saxon field, to discuss their contributions, scopes and limits about child agency in children living in poor and urban contexts, in Latin America. The objective is to contribute to the debates within the field of childhood from a sociological perspective that accentuate the capacity of action and resistance of children even in the framework of structural restrictions, without assuming a decontextualized and ideal approach about the agency.

Constructivist grounded theory method (GTM) as outlined by Kathy Charmaz has its explicit roots in the American pragmatism and symbolic interactionism primarily developed at the University of Chicago during the early and mid-twentieth century. Symbolic interactionism considers people as active and interpretative agents who co-construct selves, identities, meanings, social actions, social worlds, and societies through interactions. Charmaz argues that symbolic interactionism is an open-ended theoretical perspective that fosters studying action, process, and meanings, with a focus on how people co-construct and negotiate meanings, orders, and actions in their everyday lives. In this chapter, I argue that constructivist GTM, including its theory-method package built upon symbolic interactionism and the Chicago School tradition, can be further combined with the new sociology of childhood to study children's social worlds and negotiated meanings, orders, and actions.

Viewing the global movement for inclusive and equitable education through the lenses of the social construction of childhood and world culture theory, this chapter explores the normalized cultural conceptions of children and childhood, once situated on the periphery of policy landscapes, that have in recent years become increasingly shared by contemporary global society. I assert that a “global ideology of childhood” reflects a global consensus on the nature and needs of children, underscoring the widely held belief that all children are entitled to similar rights, protections, and childhood experiences. The overarching question addressed by this research is: How are global ideas reproduced and interpreted in national contexts? Through a case study of Nepal’s National Framework of Child-friendly Schools for Quality Education, I examine how the global ideology of childhood is reflected in a national education policy and how multilevel policy actors, and international, national and local non-governmental organizations (I/NGOs) in particular, envision the sustainability of the child-friendly school model – and broader socio-cultural ideas concerning children and childhood – in Nepal. Drawing on interviews with these actors and content analysis of policy documents, this chapter aims to provide a rich, descriptive account of how global culture is appropriated in one national context.

To contextualise the contributions in this section, we present some data on growing up in South Asian societies. It is important to consider the fundamental diversity of conditions in which children and youth live. We suggest some theoretical terms that are helpful in this regard and preview the contributions against this background. The studies on which the contributions are based impressively document the striking inequality in this region.

Using Lundy's model (2007), this chapter adopts a child-centred approach to discuss decision-making in relation to designing a study which aimed to amplify childhood voices of parental separation (Kay-Flowers, 2019). It examines the role of young people in designing and co-producing the research tools, specifically designed to give voice to childhood experiences of parental separation and divorce. It explains how the research findings were shared with different audiences and reflects on the effectiveness of the approaches taken.

The chapter starts by outlining the four elements of ‘space’, ‘voice’, ‘audience’ and ‘influence’ in Lundy's model (2007) before going on to identify the gap in existing research on children's experience of parental separation and divorce, explaining why their voices need to be heard.

A focus group of young people were involved in designing the study. Finding current methods unsuitable for addressing the research question, they co-produced new research tools specifically designed for the study, alongside the researcher, in a process known as bricolage. The chapter explains the processes involved in creating the bricolage and describes the newly created research tools which were an online questionnaire and Prompt Simulation Video (PSV).

The last part of the chapter explains how ‘audience’ and ‘influence’ informed decision-making about how the study's findings could be presented to amplify childhood voices of parental separation and divorce, to ensure they were heard by different audiences of academics, practitioners, parents, public and children. It concludes with consideration of the effectiveness of this approach.

The present chapter explicates urban and rural childhoods in India. It presents childhood as a dynamic product arising out of an intersection of children's experiences in different familial–socio-cultural contexts, and children's positions within parent–child interactions and relations. These contexts and interactions tend to colour and shape the childhoods that children inhabit. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in urban and rural India, the chapter documents (1) nature of children's engagements and (2) parent–child relations, explicitly observed in parent–child interactions, provisioning warmth and care; parental control and supervision over children and children's participation in the overall fabric of family life and so forth. Forty-eight parents (24 urban and 24 rural) of children aged 7–11 years participated in the study. Qualitative data gathered through semi-structured interviews and home observations revealed distinctions in urban and rural Indian childhoods. Urban childhood is characterised by rights and privileges, and the centrality of academic pursuits, while rural childhood is featured with subtle induction into economic and social fabric of rural life. Although the world of ‘Indian childhood’ seemed plural, childhood playfulness and learning seemed to be the unifying themes. Geared to the fact that children have to make a living with limited means in the future, both childhoods were accelerated in preparation for future. Dwelling on the complexities in children's lives, this article appreciates diversity and multiplicity in childhoods.

The category of ‘child’ is often presumed to be underpinned by ‘natural’ biological differences from the category of ‘adult’, and the category of ‘family’ is open to similar ‘naturalising’ and universalizing tendencies. Challenging this view has been a central tenet of the New Social Studies of Childhood, arguing instead that ‘child’ and ‘childhood’ are socially constructed, and highlighting children’s agency in shaping their social worlds. More complex frameworks have since emerged, whether concerning the need for a relational ontology of ‘child’, or for a recognition of the diversity of childhoods and families globally. Here we extend the debate to engage with the problematic of the very nature of ‘categories’ themselves, to explore how categorical thinking varies across, and is embedded within, linguistic, historical and philosophical processes and world views. Drawing on the examples of the categories of ‘child’ in China, and ‘family’ in Senegal, West Africa, we consider aspects of fluidity in their indigenous linguistic framing, and how their translation into European terms may fail to fully capture their meanings, which may ‘slip away’ in the process. Such ‘gaps’ between divergent linguistic framings include underlying world views, and assumptions about what it means to be human, raising issues of individuality, relationality and connectedness. Through this discussion we raise new questions concerning the processes of categorical thinking in relation to ‘child’ and ‘family’, calling for cautious consideration of what may be ‘unthought’ in these categories as they feature in much of contemporary childhood and family studies.