Search results

Sexual violence’s alarming prevalence demands action to challenge the gendered and generational relations that sustain injustice. This chapter introduces a nuanced model of consent that, if utilised to inform adults’ everyday practices with children, could empower children to identify and engage in healthy relationships and manage sexual victimisation. Inadequate sex education in adolescence engenders harmful beliefs about consent, which hinder young people’s abilities to navigate sexual relationships and limit the extent to which sexual assault survivors can understand their trauma. Accordingly, effective consent education is critical to protect and empower all human beings. Drawing on decades of childhood studies research that exemplifies the ways in which children learn through experience, this chapter argues that, by practising consent with children, adults can facilitate children’s knowledge of this moral concept. To equip adults with the thorough understanding of consent necessary to engage in truly consensual relationships, this chapter presents a theoretical explanation of children’s agency, recognising that structure, personal elements, and relationships collectively influence, and are shaped by, children’s participation. Based on a recognition of parents’ distinct role in children’s education, this model is examined in the context of children’s experiences in the home. Specifically, this analysis considers the ethics of corporal punishment and explores parental practices that could better facilitate children’s learning. The themes in this chapter emphasise the dangers of assumptions and raise fundamental questions about the ways in which society approaches human dignity and justice.

The purpose of this chapter is twofold: first, to demonstrate that the use of creative methods with children and young people is less important than creativity in the data analysis process; and second to introduce a framework for analysis which takes into account structure and agency and reveals the multi-layered context of the research encounter. The argument presented here has implications for those working within the “new” social study of childhood in the ongoing endeavor to understand children’s experiences and childhood in a social context. The model presented here is of potential value as a tool in data analysis and more widely in helping us to conceptualize childhood agency and the relationship between structure and agency. This chapter problematizes the call for creative methods with children and young people and instead focuses on creative data interpretation. An original model is presented which researchers can apply to the analysis and interpretation of data gathered in research with children and young people. The creative ways in which children and young people use the research encounter are a multi-layered response to context, which additionally demonstrates the creation of “other” spaces in and through their shared talk.

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 work presents case studies done in children’s bedrooms in Brazilian houses from socially and economically privileged families. Faced by the increasing importance of this room, a phenomenon called bedroom culture, the research analysed the materiality, and all the senses given to these spaces by parents and children. The procedures of investigation were home visits, interviews with the parents, and a video in which the child introduced their own bedroom. The authors identified: (i) furniture that gave the bedroom the aspect of a school annex; (ii) objects used as a support to remember previous generations; (iii) decorations representing a cosmopolitan ethos; and (iv) decorations pointing to a socialisation based on gender.

Home-based work results in a specific spatiotemporal arrangement: one location serves as both the family home and the workplace. This mode of work shapes the everyday family life and at the same time has to be adjusted to suit the divergent needs of all family members involved, especially if children live in the same household. So far, research on home-based work has predominantly examined home-based workers’ and adults’ perspectives. Therefore, this chapter puts children’s perspectives at the centre of the inquiry and recognises the wider web of family relations and home by focussing on the spatiotemporal coordination of everyday family life.

This chapter examines how children conceptualise parental home-based work in relation to their everyday family life and home, and how they participate in family practices in the context of home-based work.

The contribution is based on original empirical data that were collected during fieldwork with 11 families in Austria. It builds on observations of daily routines in these families, photointerviews and guided tours through the home with kindergarten and primary school-aged children as well as qualitative interviews with home-based workers living in these households.

From children’s perspectives, the findings show various independences between paid work and family life when work and home coincide. The in-depth analysis of these everyday situations emphasises how children actively modify and shape everyday family life and home in the context of parental home-based work arrangements. Family practices are constantly done and in so doing turn temporarily both the house and the workspace into a home.

The current global migration crisis has had a profound impact on family structures and dynamics. In the past few decades, scholars have paid increasing attention to the changing realities of families in transnational spheres through the: conceptualisation of the transnational family; ethnographic studies on transnational child-rearing practices; demographic analyses of cross-border families and more. As member of family units, children have naturally been part of the discussion, however few studies have explored the transnational child as the unit of analysis. In an effort in bridging the gap between transnationalism and the sociology of the family, this work utilises the vantage point of transnational children to further develop the sociology of the transnational child. Of special focus in this chapter are unaccompanied immigrant minors (UIMs) from the Northern Triangle who have been displaced by a myriad of social issues and or seek reunification with parents or other family members who have (re)settled in the United States. By exploring the lived experience within the various stages of the reunification process (i.e. separation, reunification, and post-reunification) for UIMs seeking refuge in the United States, social scientists can further analyse how the transnational child experiences and is positioned within the transnational family.

Armed conflict intermixed with terrorism poses a serious threat to children’s health and well-being around the world. It is observed that in the State of Jammu and Kashmir, children take up stones and rocks to join the controversial freedom movement. This chapter explores the lived experiences of young children and how they construct meaning of everyday life in an armed conflict. The construction of meaning is a reciprocal process between the family and the child, where children are active constructors of meaning and hence ‘active sense makers.’ Families alleviate traumatic memories of armed conflict through narrative and commemorative acts, which shape the thoughts of children. It makes a case for the contextual influences in children’s moral learning with a particular focus on the specific societal challenges associated with involvement in combat.