This article examines territorial negotiations concerning gaming, drawing on video recordings of gaming practices in middle-class families. It explores how private vs public gaming space was co-construed by children and parents in front of the screen as well as through conversations about games. Game equipment was generally located in public places in the homes, which can be understood in terms of parents’ surveillance of their children, on the one hand, and actual parental involvement, on the other. Gaming space emerged in the interplay between game location, technology and practices, which blurred any fixed boundaries between public and private, place and space, as well as traditional age hierarchies.

This article explores how Swedish children relate to adult discussions and rules concerning children's play and television habits. It is argued that the children interviewed are well aware of adult ideas concerning children, TV and play. In accounting for these rules, the children present themselves as regulated by adults, but also as valuable to their parents. A closer look at the accounts reveals that the children sometimes oppose the descriptions imposed on them and are able to argue against the perceived adult opinion. It is important to point out, however, that the children broadly express a trust in adults and their judgements.

The Swedish preschool curriculum not only prescribes documentation and quality assessment, it also requires children’s participation in the documentation process, although it offers no directions on how the documenting should be done, which can leave teachers unsure of how to do it. This study differs from research that presents pedagogical documentation as a way of enabling children’s participation in preschool in that it explores children’s participation in producing different forms of documentation in a Swedish preschool – and it finds that such participation is complex. The findings imply that, whether documentation is activity-integrated or retrospective, different forms of participation are possible.

This study explores interaction in same-sex and cross-sex foursquare games, and, in particular, how throwing (and talk) are adjusted along with diverse configurations of players. The game was played among girls and boys with immigrant backgrounds (Syrian, Kurdish, Chilean) from low-income families in a multiethnic school setting in Sweden. The study investigates girls' physicality across various game contexts, finding that as the configuration of players shifts, the forms of bodily actions the girls invoke to construct social identities shift as well. The girls used slams - ways of throwing that require force and muscular strength, physical behaviour that is not conventionally seen as part of femininity. The same girls altered throwing (and language) style, 'throwing like a girl', to downplay physical skills with less skilled girls. In cross-sex games, the girls (and the boys) playfully mock challenged gender meanings such as boys' domination and girls' subordination. The fact that the girls studied here were not restricted in physicality (or spatiality) indicates that there is considerable variation in female physicality. Overall, the findings underscore that studies of girls' (and boys') physicality should be grounded in detailed analyses of interaction in specific game contexts, with attention to cultural and institutional frameworks embedded in the games.

In this special issue, we explore child rights governance as the intersection between the study of governance and the study of children, childhood, and childrens rights. Our introduction puts forward a set of theoretical points of departure for the study of child rights governance, engaging with scholarship on human rights, international relations, history, and governance. It links the individual contributions to this special issue with four central dimensions of child rights governance, namely: temporality, spatiality, subjectivity, and normativity.

This study investigates conceptions of early childhood discipline strategies discussed in focus groups with parents and grandparents in a poor urban area in Tanzania. A grounded theory analysis suggested a model that included four discipline strategies related to corporal punishment: to beat with care, to treat like an egg, as if beating a snake and the non-care of non-beating. In order to develop strategies to prevent corporal punishment in the home in accordance with the UN recommendation and article 19 in the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the power of caregiving needs further investigation.

This study explores how siblings in Tanzania actively engage in their own socialization through the negotiation and local design of caregiving practices and control between younger siblings (age 1-3), older siblings (age 3-13) and adults. Analyses of moment-to-moment embodied, multimodal sequences of interaction illustrate how caregiving responsibility is negotiated. The analysis is multidisciplinary drawing on concepts developed in the traditions of sociology, language socialization and applied linguistics. The findings highlight the usefulness of a concept of socialization which recognizes the agency of the child and are discussed in relation to constructions of the caregiving child as both being and becoming.

Children’s rights to asylum have emerged as an urgent political challenge. This article uses a number of cases discussed in Sweden’s largest morning paper to analyse claims of asylum-seeking children and how these claims challenge the normative limits of contemporary asylum, concerning what and who ought to be recognized by law. Even though the universality of the child constitutes a running theme, the arguments and the conception of children underpinning the claims are diverse. The article suggests that the claiming of rights as a socio-political practice could be a vital analytical approach to studying children’s rights and offers a much needed alternative to the dominant mainstreaming paradigm.

In this special issue, we explore child rights governance as the intersection between the study of governance and the study of children, childhood, and children’s rights. Our introduction puts forward a set of theoretical points of departure for the study of child rights governance, engaging with scholarship on human rights, international relations, history, and governance. It links the individual contributions to this special issue with four central dimensions of child rights governance, namely: temporality, spatiality, subjectivity, and normativity.

The article illustrates ethnicity as a social construction by highlighting how students use ethnically based concepts to categorize each other as well as the Other. Although the concepts have ethnic connotations, they are mainly concerned with matters of style and behaviour. They are therefore open, fluid and inclusive because the students can alternate between the categories. The analyses draw on 1year of fieldwork in two eighth grade classes in which all students have experience of migration within their families.

This article investigates children’s participation and sense of belonging from the perspective of unaccompanied children, based on two qualitative research projects with unaccompanied children in Sweden and Finland. The results show that the unaccompanied children’s own understanding of their participation and belonging in different positions was fluid; for instance, the borders between childhood and adulthood, and striving for independence or wanting to be cared for by adults were flexible, allowing the children’s movement within and between the categories.

In international conventions as well as in the national discourses of many countries, children who do not grow up with their biogenetic parents have the right to receive information about their origin. The meaning of origin in intercountry adoption, however, is not necessarily the same as in artificial donor insemination (AID). Through an analysis of the material published by the Swedish Intercountry Adoption Authority from 1972 to 2004 and by discussing the often-drawn analogy between adoption and AID, the present article aims to investigate the varying meanings that have been ascribed to origin and the arguments that have been used in support of its importance.

Assisted reproduction policies constitute a particularly interesting case for the study of child rights governance as the child here is an intended child. The child's rights are in potential conflict not with the parental, but the reproductive rights of adults. The article aims to analyse the mobilization of the best interests of the child principle as a rhetorical resource in Swedish assisted reproduction policies and to trace the limits of governance in the name of the rights of the child.

Even though fiction and fantasy are fundamental to how childhoods today are understood, thisis a topic that is seldom explored either theoretically or academically. We address the questionof how the relationship between material real and fictive real can be understood in new ways incontemporary society. We suggest that fiction can be understood in other ways than the hithertodichotomized approaches to it, and our aim is to focus on the hybridity that is created throughthe interconnecting word and, as in fiction and childhood and material real and fictive real. Thisarticle explores how fiction can be understood as hybrid and interrelated rather than a pure andseparate phenomenon, and in particular how materiality as something real and fiction as realmingle. This article introduces ways to talk about the fictive real as realunreality and highlightsthe drawbacks that might stem from these concepts since in several ways they re-enact childhoodinnocence and nostalgia, as well as negative differences between childhood and adulthood, wheredifferent childhoods share a subordinate position in society.

Intercountry adoption is a global phenomenon, a contact zone in which notions of ‘good parents’ and ‘the child’s best interest’ are negotiated. This article explores what norms of parenthood and childhood Sweden, as a receiving country, communicates in the global flow of children and ideas. Adoption assessment reports are examined, with a focus on how adoption applicants are portrayed and how ‘good parents’ are thereby construed. The analysis demonstrates how certain qualities, for example, being loving, self-sacrificing and child-centred, are ascribed to applicants, and how the presentation of ‘good parents’ also defines a proper childhood.

The present article discusses how 12 children (five to eight years) in planned lesbian familiestalk about families, parents and specifically ‘daddies’ as such and not having a father themselves.Findings from child interviews demonstrate that the children described daddies as ‘the same’ asmummies, i.e. as having the same functions. This contrasts with previous research showing howchildren of heterosexuals often describe mothers and fathers as different. The children varied interms of how they labelled donors. Some children adopted the denomination ‘daddy’, drawing ona paternity discourse, while others simply referred to him as ‘a man’.

This article takes its point of departure in babies’ engagements with socks and seeks to explore (1) how material culture matters in babies’ everyday lives and (2) how we can understand material culture through attending to babies’ own practices, that is, babies’ culture. The ongoingness, sensoriality and movement of material culture are highlighted, and the article concludes that re-thinking material culture through babies’ engagements with socks means shifting the focus away from objects’ established meaning and towards the materials of those objects.

This article examines men's use of physical punishment when interacting with their sons or grandsons in rural Vietnam. By drawing on two periods of anthropological fieldwork in a northern Vietnamese commune, the article analyses the ways in which violence is informed by, while also perpetually reinforcing, a masculine discourse. Vietnam has ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child and in this spirit virtually all men in the local community disapprove of the use of physical punishment when bringing up boys. However, a father or grandfather occasionally beats his son or grandson when it is deemed necessary to instil discipline in a boy. The article elucidates the ways in which the contradictions between ideals of nonviolent behaviour and actual corporal punishment have fed the construction of certain codes regarding men's beating of boys. Copyright © 2006 SAGE Publications.

This is NOT an article about Alice in Wonderland. It is about the figure of Alice-the-child and an exploration of the contemporary theoretical research field of Child Studies. What if, I ask, Lewis Carroll’s Alice had been one of the sources drawn upon when forming child research theories? The idea is to explore how the fictive child character Alice in Wonderland enacts key theoretical concepts in Child Studies. Out of this exploration grows the idea of Child Studies Multiple.

This article asks questions about the ontology of child culture. It aims to position the concept of child culture at the forefront of theoretical research without creating a true or singular definition of the concept. It is rather a conceptual exploration of partial consistencies of child culture in and through practices. The focus of the analyses is on five institutional cultural practices created for children: two childrens museums, a science centre, a theme park and an amusement park. A cross-analysis of these practices provides the empirical material for proposing the notion of child culture multiple.

Using an approach inspired by conversation analysis, the present study investigates how Swedish students draw on democratic discourse during group work. The analyses demonstrate the importance of democratic issues to students. The analyses also point to how students repeatedly employ democratic discourse for a number of strategic purposes. Moreover, the analyses show that democratic arrangements at school are not always productive for schoolwork. The results are discussed in relation to previous research. In sum, the study implies that democracy must be studied as an interactive process. This entails a focus on how students do democracy at school rather than how they appear as democratic beings or how they experience student democracy retrospectively. Childhood Copyright © 2007 SAGE Publications.

This article is based upon two studies applying a life history approach, letting 15-to 16-year-olds reconstruct their own childhood in preschool and school, to see what meaning and importance children's experiences have in forming their self-concepts and philosophy of life. A combination of methods was used: written life stories, round tours in the educational settings and interviews. The round tour, a new method, helps the youths to remember and to work inductively, using later experiences, here called post-understanding, to analyse their childhood memories. The results show that relations both with people and content characterized by dialogue and reciprocity are crucial for development and learning, the project of learning and knowledge cannot be separated from the social interpersonal project. Meetings, good or bad, could become existential questions and lead to new choices and values in life. Memory plays an important part both methodologically and in forming the young people's self-concepts, values and philosophy of life. Childhood Copyright © 2007 SAGE Publications.

Recent years have seen increasing attention being paid to unaccompanied asylum-seeking children. This article provides an overview of research in the field and its implications for an understanding of these children as a particularly vulnerable category. The existing research focuses primarily on investigating the children’s emotional well-being from psychiatric and medical perspectives. Moreover, in these studies such emotional problems tend to be linked to previous and current traumatic experiences, in particular separation from their parents. By contrast, this article suggests that a critical need exists for research on unaccompanied children’s life situations based upon exploration of their own perspectives.

The article focuses on 13-year-old girls’ meaning-making processes during participation in a manual-based psycho-educational course at school. Drawing on childhood studies and ethnographic investigations of subjectivity, I explore how the course is realized in practice. The analysis, based on video-recordings of thirteen classes, shows that the girls and the teachers, through collective transformation, moves the focus from individual potential problems to relational issues. The result demonstrates the weakness of using manual-based educational courses, and indicates that cognitive methods for dealing with negative thoughts could be replaced by exercises designed to deal with interaction and strengthening the individual.

The aim of this article is, by analysing childrens discourses, to investigate their actions or absence of actions during a domestic violence episode. The empirical data are recorded group therapy sessions and individual interviews with children who have grown up experiencing their fathers violence against their mothers. The analysis shows that the childrens stories contain two aspects of actions: one related to the actions during the ongoing episode, and one the child perceives as possible/desirable for the future. The findings are discussed in the light of Lazarus and Folkmans theory of coping.