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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 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.

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.

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.