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Qualitative research has long critiqued a simplistic association between youth parenting and poor outcomes. Despite this, the UK youth parenting policy continues to view young parents through a narrow deficit lens, focused on assumed risk rather than structural inequalities. The paper brings together the direct accounts of young parents' experiences, with ethnographic observation of practice, to argue that discrimination is the critical issue associated with being a young parent. This is then set within a wider critique of the policy framework which, it is argued, perpetuates and normalises negative ideas about young parents prevalent in political, societal and cultural processes. An integrative theoretical approach is used to highlight how a deficit lens at a policy level upholds, rather than undermines, young parents' intersectional experiences of discrimination and has ethical implications for practitioners working with them. The paper calls for a reorientation of policy which addresses and disrupts discrimination.

This paper examines the participation of children and young people within government consultation pro-cesses. It considers the recent Department for Education consultation on its statutory guidance for schools for Relationships and Sex Education in England. The paper is based on a Freedom of Information request for the consultation responses categorised as from ‘young people’. We identify two issues in our interrogation of the data. First, there is evidence that a substantial proportion of responses were not submitted by young people. Second, the consultation approach did not include all the features necessary for meaningful consultation. We consider the implications for the youth consultation on policy matters that affect them.

This paper responds to concerns over the assumed ‘feminisation’ of early childhood education and care (ECEC) and adds children's perspectives to debates on whether more men should work in ECEC. Pictorial conversations were conducted with 280 children aged 2–6 years old from the cities of Edinburgh, Hong Kong and Tianjin. Findings show that although children sometimes related practitioners to their gendered experiences in and outside ECEC, children's gender subjectivities are dynamic and are linked to their short-term and long-term, fluid and stable, and interactive relationships with practitioners. This paper argues that practitioners need to openly discuss gender with children in ECEC practices and pedagogies.

Based on a qualitative study of youth identities in Greece, the paper unpacks the dynamic processes of ethnonational (dis)identification and belonging that Albanian young migrants are implicated in. Analysis of in-depth interviews illustrates how racism, coupled with their lack of citizenship, affects their (dis)identifications. Additionally, categorisation is reported to crucially mediate their belonging, giving rise to a double-edged sense of otherness and alienation. The paper concludes by putting forward a conceptualisation of young migrants’ collective identities as involving the emotive dialectic of (dis)identification, categorisation and belonging, along with negotiation of boundaries and acceptance by ‘others’ in both home and settlement societies.

This paper presents a review of the international research literature published since 2005 focusing specifically on sibling relationships in fostering and adoptive families. It presents an overview of the current state of knowledge regarding sibling relationships of fostered and adopted children as well as gaps and limitations. The review concludes that while methodological advances are apparent in this body of work siblinghood is poorly conceptualised and there has been inadequate attention to the perspectives of children. The paper goes on to suggest that one possible source of insight comes from recent work undertaken within social anthropology and sociology and the application of this theoretical and methodological approach to the study of siblinghood in out-of-home care is considered.

Interviews with survivors of intimate partner violence were conducted in order to gain information on the transition from violent relationships to new non-violent relationships. A subset of this data was re-analyzed using Social Relational Theory to gain further insight into the roles of children and important others who were identified as impacting this transition for mothers who had exited violent relationships. This paper reviews two major themes discovered during the SRT analysis that were inherent in the women’s experiences: 1) agency of children, family, peers, and community; and 2) power. In addition, this paper suggests implications for research, intervention, and psychotherapeutic practice.

Although armed conflicts and crises affect people of all ages, children are particularly susceptible to the effects of war. One significant consequence of armed conflict that is especially critical for children's well-being, is when the belligerents use tactics specifically focused on harming children, including child soldier recruitment. Despite the increased attention of policy-makers, we still lack systematic knowledge of how many children are directly and indirectly at risk of being recruited by state and non-state actors. In overcoming this gap, we have collected data on the use of children by state and non-state actors from 2010 onwards. Moreover, we estimate the number of children at risk of recruitment. The results of our mapping and estimation sketch a dark picture. According to our estimates, in 2020, approximately 337 million children (or 14%, or more than one in eight of all children globally) were living in a conflict zone with reported child soldier recruitment—that is less than 50 km from ongoing conflict, which involved at least one actor who has been reported to recruit children. We close the paper by taking stock of the current knowledge on the root causes of child soldiering, and we discuss some policy implications.

This paper focuses on the experiences of children and young people whose parents employ personal assistant(s) (PAs). It describes findings from a UK-based qualitative doctoral research study which explored the significance, influence and meaning of the PA role in supporting family life. Ten children and young adults aged 8–28 years with lived experience were interviewed face to face as part of this study, which also explored the perspectives of disabled parents and PAs. Findings reveal that PA support can alter both the quality and nature of the parent/child relationship. The provision of personal assistance can support family life and prevent children from becoming ‘young carers’; however, it can also create tension, anxiety and even destabilise family life.

Reflexivity has received relatively little analytic attention in discussions of younger adolescents’ agency. Using interview data from a sample of South Korean adolescents, this paper explores whether and how they manifested reflexivity concerning the impacts of socioeconomic inequality on their own occupational prospects. Through combining and adapting existing theorisations, it proposes a heuristic model for analysing adolescents’ reflexivity based on three interrelated continua: reflectiveness, criticality and boundedness. It is hoped this model will facilitate a more nuanced understanding of how adolescents’ agency is constructed in relation to their developing capacity for reflexivity and the impacts of structural inequalities upon it.

This paper explores the perspectives of 29 child language brokers living in the UK who interpret for their family following migration. They were presented with vignette stories depicting a potentially conflictual situation between a language broker, a parent and an adult ‘other’ in a position of power or authority. Drawing on debates about language brokering as a family care practice, the ‘parentified child’ and discussions about non‐normative childhoods, the analysis highlights how the role played by the adult ‘other’, coupled with a sometimes‐hostile sociocultural context, can exaggerate tensions or facilitate interactions in the parent–child relationship. The young people's views and experiences illuminate how they navigate these complexities.

This paper explores how more or less relationally oriented forms of professional practices could be expressed in collaborations between young people living with bodily impairments and their multiprofessional teams. The analysis was based on life-mode interviews with young people (16– 20 years), individual and focus group interviews with the professionals and participant observation in team meetings. Drawing on sociocultural perspectives on participation and the workings of power, different discourses, subject positions and participatory strategies were recognised and related to the participation of the young people. Finally, the relevance of the findings for practice is reflected on in a participation rights perspective.

Trauma-informed practice has been developing for decades, though much remains unknown regarding how it is understood and practised. Drawing upon focus group data from an evaluation of a trauma-informed approach (TIA) implemented by an organisation in Southeast England, this paper provides a unique perspective of 31 staff members and 18 young people. Results indicate how choice and control, key elements of a TIA, align with the Capability Approach (CA). The CA is then used as a novel analytic framework to examine the data. A ‘Trauma-Informed Capabilities Approach’ is introduced as a holistic, person-centred way of conceptualising young trauma survivors’ wellbeing.

This paper develops understandings of how being publicly identified and consequently labelled as ‘looked after’ can have damaging consequences for young people, particularly in how they are perceived by their peers in the context of schooling. Based on qualitative research in northern England utilising participatory approaches with young people and interviews with support staff, we explore barriers that inhibit young people’s sense of belonging. We highlight how the very processes and practices set up to support the young people can often have unintended consequences by routinely positioning them as Other, before considering the implications for education and schooling in particular.

This paper explores how children's perceptions of their agency, as something that is closely associated with its exercise, appear in relation to social structural factors, especially their socioeconomic positions, as they age. Using data from 862 10–18 years old in South Korea, we examine how children's expressed optimism about their ability to achieve their occupational choices can conceal the impact of structural factors on their ‘choices’ and dispositions for (non-)action over time. Based on the findings, we argue for a more careful interpretation of children's sense of agency that recognises its propensity to continuously adjust in contexts of structural inequality.

There is limited knowledge about key factors that enable adolescent girls with a low socioeconomic position (SEP) to adopt a healthy lifestyle. This paper aims to better understand the complexity of addressing health behaviour of adolescent girls with a low SEP by gaining insights into (i) the perspectives of adolescent girls with a low SEP (n = 26) on a healthy lifestyle, (ii) how to develop health promotion that fits these girls’ daily realities, by using participatory action research (PAR) in which girls developed health promotion materials. The study offers an understanding of girls’ daily lives and how health promotion could be improved.

Young people aged between 12 and 17 across three major British cities — London, Leeds and Nottingham — were invited to play the role of ‘jurors’ on a case where ‘the Internet was put on trial’. The recommendations reported in this paper are intended to improve digital experience and online safety as contributions to policy. These recommendations derive from the ‘youth jurors’ policy deliberations designed to encourage young people to reflect on their digital experience and collectively develop their own problem definitions and solutions.

Poverty in early childhood is pervasive, effecting every aspect of children’s lives. Under current government policies child poverty in the UK is predicted to rise to 40% by 2022. Dominant discourses of poverty have historically focussed on an over-arching discourse of moral responsibility essentially relating to deserving and underserving poor. This paper examines how government policy continues to significantly impact on young children and families low incomes in early childhood and how stigmatised discourses about welfare, work are pervasive. It is argued that discourses of redistribution and children’s rights deserve greater recognition if poverty is to be addressed.

This paper engages with the lived and experiential aspects of (trans)national identities in childhood, through the exploration of an ethnographic biography of a Greek-Albanian boy in Athens. Through a grounded ethnographic approach, we examine the ways in which he experiences and negotiates his (trans)national identity. Our analysis demonstrates the everyday subtle and sophisticated understanding of the complexities and contradictions of national identities, and the child’s own positioning within that. In conclusion, we suggest that interdisciplinary approaches should be assumed in the study of (trans)national identities in childhood, and ones that are grounded in children’s own meaning making of their experiences of such identities.

This paper reports the findings of a recent scoping study on the nature, evidence base and policy context of breakfast clubs and school holiday projects in the UK and aims to do three things. Firstly, bring child feeding initiatives firmly into the critical food and poverty debate. Secondly, critically assess the state of evidence on these projects and their perceived role in the lives of children at risk of, or experiencing, poverty. Thirdly, set out the next steps which will be required to build a systematic body of research on child feeding projects within the food and poverty research agenda.

The New Sociology of Childhood has generated a significant literature that illustrates children's agency in a wide range of contexts and settings but which oversimplifies the notion of agency. This paper develops Paul Hoggett's work on agency in the context of disadvantage to demonstrate the ways in which young people's agency is contingent on time and environmental contexts. We argue that the agency that marginalised young people enact can both implicitly pay homage to neo-liberal ideals of individual autonomy and self, while simultaneously resisting other neo-liberal ideals relating to parental and family responsibilities. This ambiguity in young people's relationship to neo-liberal ideals highlights a contradiction inherent in the same ideals, where expectations of young people with respect to their human capital development are placed uneasily alongside the notion that families are key socialising agents of young people.

This paper posits the need to align child participation principles and the emerging field of digital pedagogies. Informed by a contextualisation of children's participatory rights in contemporary technologically enhanced classrooms, the challenges of facilitating Voice Inclusive Practices are explored. Education is experiencing unprecedented change, particularly in the area of digital pedagogies, student engagement and voice. Such developments necessitate a participatory, Voice Inclusive Practice model relevant to contemporary education contexts where digital pedagogies are engaged. The potential of digital spaces in education will only be fully realised when student perspectives are included in the planning and implementation of digital pedagogies.

This paper discusses the development of a children's rights-based measure of participation and the findings from its use in a survey of 10- to 11-year-old children (n = 3773). The measure, which was developed in collaboration with a group of children, had a high reliability (Cronbach's alpha = 0.89). Findings suggest that children's positive experience of their participation rights is higher in school than in community, and higher for girls compared to boys. It is argued that involving children in the ‘measurement’ of their own lives has the potential to generate more authentic data on children's lived experiences.

This paper reports findings about parents' experiences of caring for young people with Autistic Spectrum Conditions (ASCs) moving into adulthood. In-depth interviews were conducted with 38 parents of young people (15–21 years) with ASCs. Data were analysed thematically. In the perceived absence of service support, parents' acted as ‘care-coordinators’ and ‘life-supporters’ for their child as they moved into adulthood. These roles came with little choice, emotional demands and personal restrictions. Being supported was important for parents, but preferences differed regarding what this should look like. Implications for policy are discussed.