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In what follows, I first unpack the context of East Asia where fast economic growth, demographic transition, shifting public policies, and historical legacies as well as emerging trends of family norms and practices jointly influence children's and youths' everyday lives and well-being. I show that albeit intraregional and intrasociety heterogeneities, childhood is part and parcel of the modernization project in this part of the world, which has attracted concerted efforts of intense investment from the state and the family, shaping a trajectory of childhood that is increasingly scholarized. I then sketch the landscape of childhood and youth studies in this region, calling for the intervention of childhood sociology as an approach to bring young people's own perspectives, voices, subjectivities, and actions to the fore. This is followed by an introduction to four compelling contributions that offer rich and nuanced insights into the pains and gains, pressures and perseverance of the growing up experiences of the young in rapidly changing East Asian societies.

Drawing on key concepts from childhood studies, this chapter provides a theoretical grounding for children's participation rights in research on maltreatment. The chapter discusses the sociology of childhood, tracing how it brought a focus to children's participation in research, and introduces the concepts of adultism and childism to help critique children's participation in research on maltreatment. The chapter is framed by a familiar debate on tensions between children's right to participate and their right to protection. It explores the relevance of these debates for research on child maltreatment. Through its discussion, the chapter explores key issues that have traditionally led to children being kept out of research on child maltreatment. It argues that children's participation is key to advancing knowledge on child maltreatment and fundamentally a way to uphold children's human rights. The concepts introduced in this chapter are threaded and explored throughout the subsequent chapters of the book, in their examination and reflections on children's participation in research on maltreatment.

In recent decades, childhood in Japan has undergone significant transformations. Government policies geared at boosting women's labor force participation, a declining fertility rate, rising costs of having children on the one hand, and increased spending on public childcare and support measures for families, on the other hand, contribute to these ongoing changes. Having only one child is becoming the norm while mothers' role in society is shifting. The traditional family structure is moving from the previously predominant male breadwinner model to more dual-earner families. Children now spend significant amounts of time in care and education institutions.

In this chapter, we analyze current configurations of early childhood in institutions and the family from a policy perspective and regarding children's predominant education and care arrangements. Drawing on various survey data sets and evidence from demographic statistics to pedagogical ethnographies, we look at how childcare policies and families reshape the organization of children's lives and outline how institutions and educators create learning experiences aligned with the values of a collectivist society. However, despite being deeply rooted in traditional child-rearing goals, many parents also subscribe to rigorous educational arrangements from early childhood onwards to prepare children for success in a competitive education system. The chapter finishes with an outlook on future directions of how policymakers and the ongoing institutionalization of childhood continue to change children's lives.

This chapter explores what it means for adults to claim child rights. Focussing on activism against institutional child abuse, it considers the question of what happens to the mobilisation of child rights discourse when the person claiming those rights is no longer a child. In other words, how is the concept of child rights used retrospectively and what does this reveal, both about childhood and about child rights? The chapter begins with the contention that childhood needs to be understood as not only a concept that speaks to the lives of children, their experiences, and their place within the social structure. Rather, we suggest that a more expansive view enables recognition of the enduring significance of childhood in adults’ lives. We illustrate this argument with examples of the formation of collective identities based on childhood experiences, before turning to the ways that child rights are marshalled by adults in activism, in commissions of inquiry, and in the legal sphere. Throughout the chapter, we consider issues of temporality. We explore the ways in which adult survivors of childhood abuse retrospectively claim rights denied to them in the past and we examine how activism, official inquiries, and legal mechanisms position adults in relation to their childhood selves. We then consider some of the dilemmas that arise with retrospective rights claims; particularly questions of retroactivity in relation to responsibility and redress for past abuse. Finally, we explore the temporal repositioning of childhood and how past and present is bridged. This occurs through survivor activism and, in more formal mechanisms such as inquiries, by focussing on how people are represented as child victims in the past and survivors in the present.

School exclusion in England is highly gendered, racialised and classed. For instance, boys are three times more likely than girls to be excluded from school and certain groups, including Black Caribbean boys are subject to disproportionate levels of exclusion. Against this backdrop, I explore the context and consequences of exclusion from English mainstream schooling for young masculinities. The arguments presented also have broader international significance due to a global tendency towards punitive measures in schooling. Through bringing masculinities scholarship into conversation with childhood studies, this chapter aims to present a nuanced theorisation of young masculinities which foregrounds lived experience and is located within the interdisciplinary field of childhood studies. It examines ways in which exclusion and schooling in alternative settings, such as a Pupil Referral school, can shape the identities of boys and their subjectivities. The empirical data demonstrate that excluded boys face severe constraints arising from ways in which they are positioned. Drawing on original qualitative data, it is argued that boys who are categorised in this way demonstrate highly agentic ways of ‘doing boy’. This chapter is underpinned by two questions, firstly, how can we theorise boyhood and school exclusion in ways that recognise excluded boys as agentic and constrained subjects? Secondly, what possibilities for change might our theorisation reveal? This chapter concludes by arguing for intersectional masculinities and strengthened theorisation of childhood studies which explicitly recognises lived experience. Through this discussion, I seek to illuminate the emotional costs of school exclusion and insights into ways to achieve change.

In this chapter, practice-theoretical perspectives on the production of gender and childhood are extended by the theory of new materialism. A practice-theoretical view of masculinity(ies) radicalises the concept of doing gender and thereby makes it possible to show that gender is always co-produced as part of other complexes of praxes. Thus, the connection between masculinity(ies) and youth cultural praxes can be discussed. The chapter first elaborates theoretically the connections between masculinity and childhood research. We will explore how these theoretical and methodological thoughts might be used in empirical research on masculinity(ies) and boyhood by referring to our own study on children and young people riding stunt scooters in a medium-sized city in north-west Germany.

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.

In this chapter, rephrasing Spivak's question into ‘can subaltern children speak?’, I reorient the research on China's gigantic population of children and youths in rural migrant families towards a critical interpretative approach. Based on life history and longitudinal ethnographic interview gathered with three cases, I unpack the multiple meanings migrants' children attach to mobility in their childhood experiences. First, despite emotional difficulties, children see their parents' out-migration more as a ‘mobility imperative’ than their abandonment of parental responsibilities, which should be contextualized in China's long-term urban-biased social policies and the resultant development gaps in rural and urban societies. Second, the seemingly ‘unstable’ and ‘flexible’ mobility patterns observed in migrant families should be understood in relation to a long-term family social mobility strategy to promote children's educational achievement and future attainment. The combination of absent class politics in an illiberal society with an enduring ideology of education-based meritocracy in Confucianism makes this strategy a culturally legitimate channel of social struggle for recognition and respect for the subaltern. Last, children in migrant families are active contributors to their families' everyday organization amidst mobilities through sharing care and household responsibilities, and developing temporal and mobility strategies to keep alive intergenerational exchanges and family togetherness. The study uncovers coexisting resilience and vulnerabilities of migrants' children in their ‘doing class’ in contemporary China. It also contributes insights into our understanding of the diversity of childhoods in Asian societies at the intersection of familyhood, class dynamics and cultural politics.

This research aims to explore childhood construction in the Afghan refugee community living in Pakistan. Young Afghan people aged 12–18 who were working on the streets participated in the generation of data for this study in 2019. Ethnographic research approaches with semi-structured in-depth interviews and field observations were used to obtain real insights. Young Afghan refugees have been a constant phenomenon on the streets for decades in the twin cities of Pakistan – Rawalpindi and Islamabad – where this research was conducted and are involved in different street-based casual activities. The findings show that young people face discrimination and exclusion from the mainstream of society due to their undefined citizenship status and poverty. Parents see their children as dependents and as assets for their old age, and children and young people need to work to support their families who live in poverty. In fulfilling their filial responsibilities, young people sacrifice their schooling and have limited opportunities to learn new skills. It is concluded that the government and other international institutions with responsibility for setting policies and creating programs for young Afghan refugees need to understand the dynamics of the families in which the young people live and how these families inculcate them with their generational values.