Evaluation of a group parenting programme in the Northern Territory of Australia showed significant differences in benefits for Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal boys and girls. The analysis considers whether boys and girls from different cultural backgrounds present with different problems; whether parental expectations for boys and girls differ and whether the intervention activates different responses in different settings. Conclusions suggest that there is a need to closely examine the ‘cultural logic’ of interventions, the appropriateness of their assumptions about child development and hypothesised mechanisms of change in different settings.

This article examines the use of focus groups (FGs) as a way of gathering pupils’ views on the implementation of new curricula. We provide illustrations of creative activities, which were especially designed for a case-study research project exploring the views of 11-year-old pupils in English schools adopting an innovative approach to the Year 7 curriculum. We argue that combining FGs with creative methods encourages pupils to take an active role in interviews, enriches the quality of the data being collected and enhances the place of FGs as important tools in eliciting pupils’ voices for both research and curriculum planning purposes.

The present study aims at exploring which factors predict the willingness of adolescents to disclose personal information in response to online marketing requests. Our analyses show that especially privacy concerns and perceived benefits explain a considerable portion of variance in both willingness to disclose profile data (e.g. age, hobbies, favourite products) and contact data (e.g. phone number, e-mail address, home address). An interesting interrelationship was found between profile data and contact data disclosure. Contrary to our expectations, parental mediation strategies were only a weak predictor of teenagers’ willingness to disclose contact information. Policy implications that emerge from the central findings of this study are discussed.

This article investigates the premise that Palestinian children are the authors of collective memory. Palestinian society employs an oral tradition that propagates the collective experience among different generations in which the individual dimensions of each is apparent. The oral history for Palestinian children not only illustrates past events, it also provides the tool for grasping the present and traversing the future. In this ethnographic study, 12 Palestinian children from cities, villages and refugee camps in the West Bank were interviewed. The children demonstrated active roles in reconstructing previous collective memory in relation to their own experiences and vigorously restructured the collective memory as a prerequisite for passing it to the next generation.

Despite the shift in emphasis from institutional to foster family care, in the south of Italy children in need are mainly looked after by residential services. These are required to provide family-style care and to place children on a short-term basis. Using data from research on a 100% sample of day units, residential services and children in care in the Calabria region, this article investigates the functioning of the system of care for vulnerable children at the sub-national level, describes looked-after children’s characteristics and life conditions and questions the extent to which a real deinstitutionalisation process has occurred in this area. Finally, some deinstitutionalisation recommendations are given.

The article focuses on the impact on children, schools and education during the 10 year conflict in Nepal and raises questions for further research on schooling in the post-conflict era. The article is based on research undertaken as part of a British Council funded Higher Education Link. Focus group discussions and interviews were conducted with school children, parents, teachers and community leaders between 2004 and 2006 and draws on informal discussions and observations with NGOs and teachers in the post-conflict period, including NGOs visual methods to enable children’s voices to be heard in the peace process.

Amidst concerns that young people’s mental health is deteriorating, it is important to explore their understandings of symptoms of mental health problems and beliefs around help seeking. Drawing on focus group data from Scottish school pupils, we demonstrate how they understood symptoms of mental health problems and how their characterisations of these symptoms as ‘rare’ and ‘weird’ informed participants’ perceptions that peers, teachers and parents would respond to disclosure in stigmatising ways. Consequently, participants suggested that they would delay or avoid disclosing symptoms of mental health problems. We highlight subtle gender and age differences and outline implications for policy and practice.

This article has analysed practices towards and views on cultural diversity by staff in two Norwegian kindergartens. The article has focused on food traditions both among minorities and the Norwegian majority that serve as border markers and are used in differentiating processes among the staff. The analysis found concurrent processes towards cultural homogenisation and increased diversity and experienced that staff members are in the process of developing a perception about minority children that is complex, shifting and intersecting, rather than a straightforward perception based solely on minority status. However, the study also identified a tendency operating in parallel where, even though the ideal goal is equality in results, the outcome in practice is often a majority-based equality practice that leaves little room for difference.

This article focuses on how girls create places of meaning and opportunity through collective movement. It is based on an ethnographic study of the everyday experiences and mobility of 10–13 year old girls living in a suburb of Copenhagen, Denmark. ¹ The girls ventured for a sense of freedom and a ‘place of their own’ to pursue their interests and social relationships. For some girls the creation of places where they felt ‘at home’ would entail breaking rules and transgressing spatial boundaries set by adults.

Over the last 40 years child protection systems in all Advanced Western Societies have been subject to high profile criticisms and regular major reviews. In many respects the Munro Review of Child Protection (2011) in England, is very different to those which have gone before. This paper summarises the main findings and recommendations of The Review and locates it in its immediate policy and practice contexts. The paper also begins to identify some of its possible gaps and challenges and argues that the success of The Review is likely to depend on cultural, political and economic factors well beyond its influence and outlines what these are.

This paper focuses on recent discourses and practices of listening to young children, in order to highlight listening as an ethical practice in early childhood education and care settings. The paper asks how discourses of listening should be viewed in theoretical terms and explores the work of a diverse range of authors who define autonomy and rights issues as relational. Central to the paper is a consideration of feminist critique of Foucault’s ethics of care argument. To contextualise this, the paper discusses examples of recent research in the field of listening to young children and highlights issues facing the status of the early years workforce. In summary, the paper contends that an ethical view of listening can bring adults and children together in democratic care practices which challenge conceptions of childhood and reconnect ideas of care and education.

This study explores the construction of discourses about childhood in the Greek daily press. It employs the theoretical frameworks of the new sociology of childhood and critical discourse analysis to question which discourses of childhood are constructed in the daily press presenting cases where children were the victimisers in school violent episodes. The study showed that while there are distinct discourses constructed in the texts such as the romantic childhood, the minority group childhood, the homogeneous childhood and the childhood as actor, these tend to co-exist textually. Results are critically discussed in relation to the positioning of children through everyday practices such as the daily press.

Prevalence studies of emotional health and well-being (EHWB) of young people indicate that that there is cause for concern. Very few studies have examined EHWB from the perspective of young people. This study examined the views of young people about their EHWB in the context of secondary education in the UK. Eight focus groups were conducted in five secondary schools with pupils in year 10 (aged 13–14). The findings suggested that whilst pupils thought some aspects of EHWB are well provided for in the school curriculum, there were problems with coherence of EHWB policy. Mental health topics were thought to be neglected in the EHWB curriculum especially in relation to self-harm. Three problems regarding talking about EHWB were identified. Firstly, the quality of EHWB lessons depended on the enthusiasm and creativity of the teacher taking the lesson. Secondly, pupils were concerned about confidentiality. Thirdly, many pupils preferred to talk to friends about EHWB issues. The findings of the study suggest a need for greater involvement of young people in the planning, implementation and evaluation of the EHWB curriculum.

The article explores how children use different types of knowledge of place to make sense of their relations to other children. The participants are children aged 11–12 in a small town in southern Sweden. The methodology used is place mapping with group interviews. A significant outcome is that the children connect emplaced and spatial knowledge in their efforts to understand themselves and others. Their emplaced knowledge is thus not separated from the spatial knowledge. Another significant result is that the participating children are engaged in an exchange of knowledge of place with other children and with adults.

Researchers who involve children in their research are faced with the challenge of choosing between differing theoretical approaches which can prioritise children’s autonomy rights or their ‘vulnerability’ and their need to be protected. Somewhat confusingly, ethical guidelines seem to reflect a combination of these approaches. Even when researchers have settled on their preferred approach, they may find that this then has to be modified in accordance with gatekeeper requirements. In the context of children’s involvement in a child safety online project, this paper highlights the difficulties encountered because of a tension between children’s autonomy rights, educational norms in a school setting and child protection concerns and considers whether an appropriate balance was achieved.

This paper reports on the findings of a documentary analysis of policies and procedures relating to self-harm from a range of organisations working with young people in the UK. It identifies the extent to which policies and/or procedures relating to self-harm are available for service providers and offers a wider understanding of the concepts of self-harm and approaches to helping as incorporated into service guidance and delivery. It highlights the prevalence of self-harming behaviours in a climate of stigma and the need to define appropriate and supportive agency responses from a trained staff that is both sensitive and individualised.

The aim of this article is to open up a discussion about an unexplored area of children’s lives at school. While there has been considerable discussion of issues about child protection and the cooperation between school and social services in that context, studies on the intersection between school and family law proceedings seem virtually non-existent. This is also the case when it comes to family law proceedings and different forms of childhood adversity. Drawing upon previous and ongoing research on family law and domestic violence in Sweden, together with a number of other existing studies on children and domestic violence, this article outlines the potential impact of family law proceedings upon school as well as issues requiring further research exploration.

This paper presents findings from a qualitative study undertaken with 46 African and African Caribbean men exploring their experiences of fatherhood. Data analysis was informed by Connell’s theoretical work on changing gender relations. Findings indicate that fathers’ lives were mediated by masculinities, racism, gender, migration and generational changes in parenting. Fathers advocated a style of parenting centred on good communication with children. The implications of findings for theory, future research and health and social care policy regarding both children’s well-being and the inclusion of fathers by health and social care practitioners are discussed.

This interpretative study aims to offer metaphors that describe family meanings from the adolescent’s perspective by encouraging them to give a metaphor with their own explanation on a self-administering essay form. This study has three objectives: to explore the family meanings as a metaphor from the Hong Kong adolescent’s perspective; to reveal any common and unique features of these metaphors; and to search for the possibilities of collecting metaphors from adolescents as a pre-counselling assessment tool. The 12 participants for this study were referred to me for family counselling because of poor self-esteem, loss of life goals or ineffective relationships with their parents. Based on the 12 metaphors, the following five themes can be discerned: (i) gender role in a family, (ii) Chinese culture in a family, (iii) heat in a family, (iv) security in a family and (v) the family as honey and a loan company. Based on the above five themes, there are some common metaphors (e.g. a warm place, honey, a shelter, a boat shelter, a chick and a hen, a volcano, a fire, an oven and a loan company), trans-cultural and unique metaphors (e.g. a wet market and ‘Kung Fu’ experts), and those that are culturally specified. Both strengths and limitations of collecting and analysing metaphors were discussed.

Most children in state care do not do as well in school as their peers, but the period of leaving care and transition to adulthood may offer a ‘turning point’ for positive change. Based on a small study of care leavers in England, this article employs the concept of resilience to explore the significance of supportive relationships in enabling this group of young people to make decisions about their future and encouraging them to overcome setbacks in educational attainment.

This paper describes an exploratory evaluation of the Peers Early Education Partnership ‘Room to Play’, an innovative and experimental ‘drop-in’ service seeking to attract and engage ‘hard-to-reach’ families in one of the most deprived areas of a Midlands city. Located in a shop unit of a busy community shopping centre, it offers play and learning activities for children, and provides opportunities for parents to talk to practitioners in a neutral and supportive environment. Through a mixed methods design, the authors attempted to document the core components of a potential transferable model of intervention, within challenging research constraints.

This paper considers the lives of children living in a large informal settlement in central Accra, Ghana. Its contention is that children remain largely absent from the renewal of interest in slums and that where they do feature it is largely as objects of risk and vulnerability. Such an exclusive focus, it is argued, risks effacing the ways in which children are capable of actively confronting the terrible constraints posed by slum environments and the ‘talent for living’ that this involves. Drawing upon the findings of a small qualitative exploratory research project, the paper examines sources of support and cooperation between children and how their decisions to work are perceived as a strategy to actively support mothers and families struggling for a subsistence.

This study examines the location of British health visiting in contemporary policy discourses concerned with public health and safeguarding children. It argues that professional identity and orientation can be understood through health visiting’s long history of public health work with children and families, which has included an engagement with protecting children. The expansive safeguarding children agenda, which includes the requirement to undertake a progressive universal approach to service provision and which incorporates a broad concept of risk and requires early intervention, has created tensions, particularly given current workforce constraints. The location and visibility of British health visiting in the academic and practice worlds also shape how the profession is understood.

This article explores the form of children’s political engagement, considering the politicization of events, their political understanding and alignments. It draws on research into memories of childhood and social change in the latter half of the 20th century and builds on academic debates about children’s political participation. Children’s experience of policing, industrial unrest, popular dissent, social movements and party politics is discussed. Children’s political engagement involves three elements. They must navigate different political perspectives, their understanding grows through feelings of concern and empathy, and they align to groups they can relate to and feel might make a difference.

This article uses a qualitative approach to elicit the views of 31 professionals who provide services to vulnerable young men. The findings reveal six key themes following focus group interviews: (i) the importance of masculinity in explaining problematic behaviour; (ii) the misuse of alcohol and drugs; (iii) alienation and social isolation; (iv) concerns about suicide and self-harm; (v) the quality of existing services; and (vi) recommendations for changes to services. Service providers generally acknowledged the social context in explaining these behaviours and argued for enhanced services and a more developed skills base in working with vulnerable young men.

This article explores the exercise of heterosexist-infused power relations within a Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS) inpatient unit in the UK. The ways in which heterosexism may wield its power within CAMHS in conjunction with the support of sexism, adultism, classism and sanism are discussed. That is, this article contributes to the understanding and subverting of heteronormativity in practice. With this focus in mind, other forms of intersecting oppressions are detailed to highlight the role they play in both controlling young people and teaching them about the workings of patriarchy and social norms. The aim of the article is to contribute to the disruption of the heteronormativity inherent in the arrangements within CAMHS and the dominant normative practice that produces multiple subjectivities in this setting.

Recent public concern about youth gangs in Britain has prompted a narrow, almost stereotypical, range of US-derived policy responses. This paper argues that family support is an unexplored but potentially effective gang reduction tool, but in order to overcome persistent concerns regarding misidentification, stigmatic labelling and policy misdirection, programmes must not only be ‘good science’ but also be non-punitive, acceptable to families and context-sensitive. Beginning with a discussion of the grounds for intervention, the paper identifies likely barriers from the point of view of the parents of gang members, and from these, derives necessary standards for effective support. The paper describes some promising (‘public health oriented’) and unpromising (‘criminal justice oriented’) programmes, and argues for more ‘gang-sensitive’ family support and a related research agenda.

Most of the literature on paediatric oncology treatment has provided descriptions of children’s everyday lives that are circumscribed to periods of hospitalisation. In this paper, I argue that the political and economic context where children receive oncology treatment as well as the particular trajectories of their families influence their experiences. The narratives from children receiving treatment in three public hospitals in Buenos Aires, Argentina, were collected. Their stories indicate that issues such as the interruption of school, the separation of family members, the expenses incurred during treatment, and barriers to care influence the everyday lives of children and should be included in paediatric oncology research. © 2011 The Author(s). Children & Society © 2011 National Children’s Bureau and Blackwell Publishing Limited

In Sweden, children’s health and development are promoted through Primary Child Health Care (PCHC) visits. The children participate in these visits from their own perspective through bodily and verbal expressions. This study explores four-year-old children’s expressions when they as actors take part in a PCHC situation. The conceptualisation of the children’s expressions reveals various actions that exhibit their affirmative and delaying negotiation strategies to influence and deal with these situations. For PCHC nurses, these findings may encourage to view children as negotiating participants and inspire to sensitivity when inviting children and guiding them through health visits. © 2011 The Author(s). Children & Society © 2011 National Children’s Bureau and Blackwell Publishing Limited

There are few published articles on conducting large-scale surveys in secondary schools, and this paper seeks to fill this gap. Drawing on the experiences of the Youth On Religion project, it discusses the politics of gaining access to these schools and the considerations leading to the adoption and administration of an online survey. It is concluded that successful research in schools has to be planned carefully in collaboration with key members of staff, and justified as an educational activity. Providing speedy feedback was helpful to ensure schools benefited from the research and to keep them engaged with the project. © 2011 The Author(s). Children & Society © 2011 National Children’s Bureau and Blackwell Publishing Limited

In this paper, we suggest that the ability and opportunity to play affords children a natural resource to meet intellectual and emotional challenge. Analysis of case studies focusing on interventions with children caught in the bombing of Beirut, children abandoned to the state system in Romania, and the street children in Rio de Janeiro and Cali is used to support this view. When resources are in deficit, challenge is more likely to become adversity. The impact of adversity is particular to context, but comparison across contexts also shows connections between children’s disparate experiences. Analysis confirms that given the opportunity, children interact with and influence their environment through play and that this process provides a resource to meet the challenge of adversity.

This article describes a qualitative study exploring the effects of community-based human rights and pro-equality education on Bolivian adolescent boys. By privileging the boys’ own voices, the study examines how the boys’ sense of solidarity toward others, derived from the citizenship duties and collegiality emphasised in non-governmental workshops, impacted their commitment to gender equality. Research implications include the importance of educating young males on females’ rights and listening to the boys’ views on the resulting progress and remaining challenges regarding the attainment of sustainable gender equality in social spheres and public policies.

This article describes a research study that investigated three- and four-year-old Canadian preschool children’s perceptions about starting kindergarten. Findings from 33 focus-group discussions suggest that children begin to formulate ideas about starting kindergarten prior to school entry. Children’s responses were grouped according to three themes, play versus academic activities and homework; getting bigger but still needing help; and rules. Overall, the responses highlighted their expectations regarding continuity and discontinuity between the two environments. These findings support the position that children should be given the opportunity to contribute to the planning of transition practices.

This paper examines the different contexts for leadership in children’s services with a particular focus on integrated working. It reviews contemporary theories that appear to offer relevant frameworks for thinking about children’s service leadership. It is argued that children’s services require leadership at all levels to enable a dynamic, interactive service on the front line. Multi-professional team leadership is a crucial and much underestimated role in integrated services, which should be thinking in terms of leadership capacity throughout the organisation rather than focusing predominantly on the most senior roles in the hierarchy.

This article describes challenges met implementing an early intervention programme for Aboriginal parents and their children in the NT (Northern Territory) of Australia in the context of efforts to remediate Aboriginal disadvantage. The intervention is an adaptation of an 8- to 10-week, manualised parenting programme designed for four- to six-year-old children with behavioural difficulties. It was implemented for both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal children in urban Darwin and for Aboriginal children in three communities of the Tiwi Islands, near Darwin. Measured outcomes of the programme were positive overall with different outcomes by gender and Indigenous status. There were marked differences in retention of families from different socio-cultural backgrounds in the programme, with a significant loss of participants from referral through commencement to six-month follow-up. This drop-out was most marked for urban Aboriginal participants, despite highly flexible strategies of engagement and cultural adaptation of the approach pursued in each setting. The research provides lessons for the contextualisation of preventive interventions in diverse community settings and shows that systematic attention to cultural ‘fit’ of the intervention logic and cultural competence in engagement of disadvantaged families with multiple problems are fundamental to sustainability.

There is growing evidence that children labelled as academically gifted are subjected to negative attitudes from others and that this impacts on their self-esteem and motivation to succeed. Through an analysis of British newspaper stories about gifted children, this article explores the socially constructed nature of the concept of the ‘gifted child’ and finds that children identified as gifted academically are framed more negatively than those who are exceptionally able in music or sport. The article questions the growing practice of labelling children as academically gifted in English schools given the negative stereotypes that surround this classification.

Based on 65 interviews with professionals and parents conducted during 2007–2008, this 16-month, mainly qualitative evaluation of Parentline Plus’ Time to Talk Community Programme (a preventative initiative within England’s teenage pregnancy strategy) found that a community development approach and an ethos of partnership with parents and professionals facilitated engagement. Respectful and realistic implementation involved skilled workers building relationships of trust. By consulting with other professionals and parents it was possible to establish local need and to build on existing provision. Initially, insufficient prior local consultation and negotiation created perceptions of an imposed initiative, led by outsiders, resulting in wary local parents and professionals. The engagement and evaluation processes are considered in relation to the short-term nature of the initiative and potential conflicts between responding flexibly to the needs of parents and delivering targeted programmes.

This paper reports on collaborative research conducted with ChildLine Scotland, a free, confidential, telephone counselling service, using their database. We focussed on children’s calls about parental health and well-being and how this affected their own lives. Children’s concerns emerged within multi-layered calls in which they discussed multiple issues and problems in their lives such as alcohol misuse, drug misuse, domestic violence, family relationships, depression, mental health problems and bereavement. We discuss how children were making sense of these experiences; how they were trying to get by in difficult family circumstances; whose help they valued; and conclude with implications for policy and practice.

Over the past decade, child soldiers have inundated the popular media. Images of boys armed with AK47s appear ubiquitous, providing a cautionary tale of innocent childhood gone awry. While these representations turn commonly held assumptions of a protected and innocuous childhood on its head, what they conceal is as provocative as what they reveal. Popular news media tells us little about the children behind the guns or the complexity of their wartime and post-war experiences. Attempting to move beyond the narrow depictions, this paper explores the realities of a cohort of child soldiers in Sierra Leone and their experiences of armed conflict. Drawing upon in-depth interviews conducted over a two-year period, children’s experiences defy the limiting portrayals offered by media discourse. While these children are frequently constructed through a framework of extremes (as either extreme victims, extreme perpetrators or extreme heroes), in reality, the lives of these children fall within the grey, ambiguous and paradoxical zones of each.

Parenting interventions were an important feature of New Labour’s policies to combat social exclusion. This paper critically examines parenting programmes for families with adolescents, assessing national and local policy aims against the perspectives of women who took part in a parenting course, which was the subject of a local evaluation. The paper argues that, while there were important positive outcomes for the participants, the high levels of unmet need which women reported reflect important disparities between the aims of the intervention, the level of service provision, and the needs and concerns of mothers and grandmothers.

Commentaries on childhood, whilst abundant, largely depend on secondary sources, namely adults. This research attempts to address the question ‘what is childhood?’ by consulting the primary source — children. This case study, of children attending a day-care centre in the West Midlands, England, adopted research tools that were developed to meet the needs of young children as research participants. Perspectives of childhood were identified and labelled the ‘Playful Child’, the ‘Unknowing Child’, the ‘Needful Child’ and the ‘Unauthorised Child’. The findings suggest a necessary review of the role of the early years practitioner, in particular where practitioners are ‘playing with’ young children.

This study discusses young couples’ interactions with maternity and health services paying particular attention to men’s perspectives. Findings are based on research conducted in Scotland with men (aged 16–25) and their teenage partners (aged 16–19). Most young men were very involved in their child’s life and provided support and care to their partner during pregnancy and in early parenthood. Men often felt excluded or judged when accessing services, although positive experiences were reported too. The study discusses ways in which maternity and health services can be better attuned to meet the needs of young couples and be inclusive of men.

The OECD (2006 Starting Strong II: Early Childhood Education and Care. OECD Publishing: Paris) envisions early childhood education and care settings as meeting places for diverse social groups; places that build social capital. This vision was assessed in a comparison of three preschools types: full-fee paying, subsidised-fee and publicly funded. The social composition within each was examined and the connectedness of the children (n = 472) who attended compared. Publicly funded preschools had more socially diverse populations. The quantity of social connectedness did not differ but children in publicly funded preschools described higher quality social relationships. Not all preschool settings are socially diverse but, where they are, the quality of relationships is highest.

This article describes the use of an innovative method, reality boxes, to elicit the perspectives of children, ages four to seven years, in state care. Using examples from a broader research project based on children in Northern Ireland, which was concerned with their participation rights, the article considers how the children used the boxes to express their views. Informed by a child rights-based approach, the article highlights the processes and practices involved and concludes by stressing the potential importance of this method, used in the context of this framework, in social work practice with young children.

The provision of parenting support is a key feature of wealthier nations’ health and social care services. However, attendance and engagement by the neediest parents remains poor. Barriers experienced by parents include personal life factors (beliefs, lifestyles and limited resources) and programme-specific factors (delivery, content and support arrangements). Here we give consideration to these issues, drawing on published reviews of parenting programme effectiveness identified through a comprehensive search of electronic databases. We suggest ways of improving attendance and engagement, by providing programmes as part of a comprehensive framework of family support.

This study explores the significance of food and mealtimes in relation to the transition into foster care and the therapeutic settling of the child in a new family. In doing so, we draw upon an in-depth, qualitative case study of 10 experienced foster families in the UK focusing on what helped them to be successful. At the time of the study, there were 16 foster children, aged 9–16, living with the families. Data collection included semi-structured qualitative interviews and audio-diaries with all family members who wished to be involved as well as eco-maps produced by the young people. Thematic analysis and data extracts are reproduced in the study to demonstrate that meals and food preferences can function to affirm identities, membership and boundaries of family life as well as provide a site of conflict and control.

The study describes an evaluation of a 48-week physical activity and nutritional education programme for overweight/obese school-age children using quantitative and qualitative methods. The majority of participants were obese or severely obese when enrolled, and while some improvements in body mass index, self-esteem and engagement in a range of physical activities were noted, difficulties in evaluating a complex community-based intervention were highlighted. Children, parents and health professionals described a range of benefits from attending the programme but more intensive services are likely to be needed for the most seriously obese children and for those families resisting intervention.

Research from the Economic and Social Research Council programme on Pathways Into and Out of Crime prioritised young people’s ‘voices’ in exploring experiences of crime and a range of intervention services. Drawing on data from interviews with 110 young people, this paper explores their perspectives of professional assessment. Embedded within neo-liberal youth welfare policies are a number of contradictions. Policies encourage ‘individualisation’, ‘responsiblisation’ and ‘self-realisation’ while also needing to maintain control and regulation of ‘risky’ populations. This paper explores the implication of these contradictions through examining the experiences of young people being assessed in youth justice and education. The impact on their identities as neo-liberal citizens is discussed in the conclusion.

While studies have shown that adults use smoking to deal with stress, little research has been carried out with children to explore their perceptions of smoking as a coping strategy. Qualitative questionnaire and interview data were generated with children aged 9–11 years. Participants perceived that adults smoked to relieve boredom and stress, and suggested that children might smoke for the same reasons. Children were more likely to know that adults smoked to deal with stress if they lived in a deprived area. Girls were more likely to believe that some children need to smoke as a coping strategy.

This article argues that universal documents on children’s rights can provide illustrative examples as to how childhood is identified as a unity using difference as an instrument. Using Gille Deleuze’s theorising on difference and sameness as a framework, the article seeks to relate the children’s rights project with a critique of representation. It seeks to illustrate how the children’s rights project seems to be promoting an image of childhood that is sharply contrasted by adulthood in a dichotomised sense, as well as how, in these documents, the fate of the child is being intertwined with the fate of the state.

Mentoring has become a popular model of intervention to reduce the risk of offending, and has been proposed as an effective tool to tackle the risk of gang membership. This paper reviews the existing literature on mentoring and reports on a qualitative evaluation of a mentoring programme targeted at young people ‘at risk’ of gang membership in an English city. The study highlights important issues around these interventions. Although we found it a useful way to engage otherwise hard-to-reach families, important limitations remain: their potential labelling impact and their limited impact in isolation from other more ambitious measures.

In the context of government decentralisation and integration of services, over the last 15 years Sweden has been developing an all-day school based on inter-professional teamworking and adopting a holistic approach to working with children. The article describes these recent educational reforms in Sweden, which have sought to re-structure the school and develop new ways of working, offers some evaluative comments on this process and considers possible implications of these reforms for other countries. It compares Swedish school reforms with recent English policy developments intended to make ‘extended schools’ a universal provision by 2010.

This exploratory study explored the experience of being an older sibling, from the perspective of children with disabilities. A phenomenological approach was used to investigate the experiences of 10 children with disabilities. The participants described engagement in older sibling roles that they perceived to positively influence their sense of self. In most instances participants perceived family dynamics, gender and personality to be more influential on this engagement than their impairment. Children with disabilities engage in a diversity of roles as an older sibling. These roles need to be respected and built upon in family centred-practice to enable children to fully contribute to family life.

This paper examines differences in life satisfaction among children in different family structures in 36 western, industrialised countries (n = 184 496). Children living with both biological parents reported higher levels of life satisfaction than children living with a single parent or parent–step-parent. Children in joint physical custody reported significantly higher levels of life satisfaction than their counterparts in other types of non-intact families. Controlling perceived family affluence, the difference between joint physical custody families and single mother or mother–stepfather families became non-significant. Difficulties in communicating with parents were strongly associated with less life satisfaction but did not mediate the relation between family structure and life satisfaction. Children in the Nordic countries characterised by strong welfare systems reported significantly higher levels of life satisfaction in all living arrangements except in single father households. Differences in economic inequality between countries moderated the association between certain family structures, perceived family affluence and life satisfaction.

The aim of this article is to show how research practices may simultaneously follow principles of children’s citizenship rights to participation and principles of protection and support when children exposed to violence are informants. The article focuses upon organisation of interview processes and interactions between adult researchers and child informants in interview encounters. We point to a number of ways in which one may negotiate the tensions between, on the one hand, victimised children’s vulnerability and dependence upon adults for protection and support, and on the other these children’s agency and rights to participation.

This review summarises the research literature on children’s and parents’ involvement in social work decision making, which is regarded, in policy terms, as increasingly important. In practice, however, it tends to be messy, difficult and compromised. Different individuals or groups may have different understandings of participation and related concepts, while differences of age and disability also mediate effective user engagement. The literature highlights common themes in effective participatory practice with both children and their parents. Central to this are the establishment of relationships of trust and respect, clear communication and information and appropriate support to participate.