Childhood is increasingly saturated by technology: from television to the Internet, video games to 'video nasties', camcorders to personal computers. Children, Technology and Culture looks at the interplay of children and technology which poses critical questions for how we understand the nature of childhood in late modern society. This collection brings together researchers from a range of disciplines to address the following four aspects of this relationship between children and technology:
*children's access to technologies and the implications for social relationships
*the structural contexts of children's engagement with technologies with a focus on gender and the family
*the situatedness of children's interactions with technological objects
*the constitution of children and childhood through the mediations of technology
_ This book represents a substantial contribution to contemporary social scientific thinking both about the nature of children and childhood, the social impacts of technologies and the various relationships between the two.

Increasingly children are being seen as competent social agents in their own right, rather than as inchoate versions of adults. This poses questions for how we understand the social worlds of pre-adolescent children and their relationships with each other, as well as adults.
This volume explores children's relationships from a variety of theoretical and methodological standpoint, through the use of a wide range of empirical data. A practical application of the children's social competence model, it focuses on children's social interactions, as opposed to what children's social competence means from the adult perspective of researchers and policy makers. It looks at the ways in which children are allowed, by adults, to be socially competent.

A text which addresses the relationship between childhood, competence and the social arenas of action in which children live their lives. Taking issue with the view that children are merely apprentice adults, the contributors develop a picture of children as competent, sophisticated social agents, focusing on the contexts which both enable and constrain that competence.

Childhood is increasingly saturated by technology: from television to the Internet, video games to 'video nasties', camcorders to personal computers. Children, Technology and Culture looks at the interplay of children and technology which poses critical questions for how we understand the nature of childhood in late modern society. This collection brings together researchers from a range of disciplines to address the following four aspects of this relationship between children and technology:
*children's access to technologies and the implications for social relationships
*the structural contexts of children's engagement with technologies with a focus on gender and the family
*the situatedness of children's interactions with technological objects
*the constitution of children and childhood through the mediations of technology
_ This book represents a substantial contribution to contemporary social scientific thinking both about the nature of children and childhood, the social impacts of technologies and the various relationships between the two.

Seit den 1990er Jahren ist das aufstrebende Feld der Kinderforschung ein Katalysator für empirische Forschung, für Politikanalyse und für die Entwicklung der beruflichen Praxis. Welche Konzepte und Theorien sind bei der Analyse von Phänomenen, die für das Leben von Kindern relevant sind, am hilfreichsten? Das Buch reflektiert diese Debatte und diskutiert aktuelle Herausforderungen der wichtigsten Disziplinen innerhalb der Soziologie der Kindheit.