Series Information:
Future of Childhood

Conceptualising Child-Adult Relations focuses on how children conceptualise and experience child-adult relations. The authors explore the idea of generation as a key to understanding children's agency in intersection with social worlds which are largely organised and ordered by adults. within this broad theme, the authors explore two interconnected themes: how children define the division of labour between children and adults, and how far children regard themselves as constituting a separate group. This book is ground-breaking in its focus on the variety and commonality in children's lives and views across a broad range of contexts. It provides innovative theoretical approaches to the growing study of childhood by homing in on intergenerational relations as a main concept, and draws attention to links across the main sites of children's lives such as the home, neighbourhood and school. Moreover, for policy related issues, this book provides food for thought about the social conditions and status of childhood, and the factors structuring it.

So far, research on the welfare state has usually neglected children and childhood. In the rare attempts to include childhood in welfare state analysis, too much emphasis was placed on children as future adults. However, only a full recognition of children as human beings and citizens here and now are compatible with new social studies of childhood as well as children's rights discourses. Thus the conceptual integration of children and childhood in the welfare state is still an open question. This book closes the gap by offering the concept of generational order as theoretical tool to both childhood and welfare state research. In analogy to gender analysis, this concept is an adequate tool in providing visibility to the adult bias of traditional welfare state theories and practices. The book includes contributors from ten predominantly European countries, exploring issues of children's social and economic welfare, such as child poverty in a theoretical, methodological, and practical perspective. Together with the companion volume below Flexible Childhood, also by the University Press of Southern Denmark this book is the final result of COST Action A19, Children's Welfare, which has been supported by the European COST Framework.