Childrens Geographies

Transnational migration, changing care arrangements and left-behind children's responses in South-east Asia
Hoang LA, Lam T, Yeoh BS and Graham E
Recent increases in the volume of labour migration from South-east Asia - and in particular the feminisation of these movements - suggest that millions of children are growing up in transnational families, separated from their migrant parents. Drawing on both quantitative and qualitative data collected in Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam, the study seeks to elucidate care arrangements for left-behind children and to understand the ways in which children respond to shifts in intimate family relations brought about by (re)configurations of their care. Our findings emphasise that children, through strategies of resistance, resilience and reworking, are conscious social actors and agents of their own development, albeit within constrained situations resulting from their parents' migration.
Parental smoking and children's anxieties: An appropriate strategy for health education?
Holdsworth C and Robinson J
While the prevalence of smoking has declined in the UK in recent years, class differentials in smoking behaviour have become more marked and smoking is increasingly recognised as a causal factor in inequalities in health. Health education initiatives to support both smoking cessation and to teach children about the health risks of smoking remain key initiatives in reducing health inequalities. However, teaching children about the risks of smoking and the impact of parental smoking in their health is not straightforward for children from backgrounds who are more likely to encounter smoking at home and in their local communities. These children have to reconcile the key messages taught at school and reinforced in smoking cessation campaigns with the knowledge that their parents and other family members smoke. In this paper we consider how children from smoking homes make sense of these education and health campaigns as observed by their parents, and the impact that this has on both parental smoking and relationships within the home. The paper thus seeks to challenge assumptions about the delivery of health education and the need to acknowledge family diversity.
School holidays: examining childhood, gender norms, and kinship in children's shorter-term residential mobility in urban Zambia
Hunleth J, Jacob RR, Cole SM, Bond V and James AS
This article discusses a practice of child residential mobility in Zambia that is frequently overlooked in migration studies and difficult to capture through standard survey methods: the practice of 'going on holiday' to the homes of relatives during breaks in the school term. Drawing on child-centered and quantitative research, this article examines the multiple dimensions of 'going on holiday' for children living in a low-income urban settlement in Lusaka. Findings suggest that the practice was gendered and may map onto changing norms in schooling in Zambia. Within a context where resources are severely constrained, going on holiday may serve as one means for cultivating reciprocity, sharing the burden of care and household labor, and strengthening kin ties. This work further demonstrates the importance of using locally meaningful terms and practices in survey research where general questions about children's mobility may fail to capture the nature and extent of children's movements.
'Now They're Coming After Our Schools': Interrogating Urban Intimacies of Children and Displacement
Scott MR
Education scholars grappling with policy issues related to community and identity issues may pay attention to the work of emotion. Rationalist, psychological frameworks that bound many educational researchers' policy analyses are limited in scope: the policy process is seen as a linear cause-and-effect process. A feminist geographic attention to this research offers a more complex understanding of the experiences of policy. Using children's displacement by gentrification as an example, this commentary will show how a feminist geographic understanding of place attachment offers a more complete understanding of the effects of gentrification. Specifically, using the concept of the 'intimate city' (Datta 2016), I show how the global process of gentrification is entangled with the intimate embodiment of emotions. And in order to effectively study education policy, we must be attuned to how children embody their emotions.
Higher education students' aspirations for their post-university lives: evidence from six European nations
Brooks R, Gupta A and Jayadeva S
While there is now a relatively large literature on young people's aspirations with respect to their transitions from compulsory schooling, the body of work on the aspirations of those within higher education is rather less well-developed. This article draws on data from undergraduate students in six European countries to explore their hopes for their post-university lives. It demonstrates that although aspirations for employment were discussed most frequently, non-economic plans and desires were also important. Moreover, despite significant commonalities across the six nations, aspirations were also differentiated, to some extent at least, by national context, institutional setting and subject of study.
Do neighbourhood characteristics matter in understanding school children's active lifestyles? A cross-region multi-city comparison of Glasgow, Edinburgh and Hong Kong
Olsen JR, Leung KYK, Nicholls N and Loo BPY
Many studies have explored the influence of individual and neighbourhood factors on active school travel (AST), this novel study is the first to examine how AST and formal extracurricular activities are associated with children's active lifestyles. The aims of this study were to (a) create an active lifestyle variable (ALIFE) measured in terms of total weekly minutes of AST and extracurricular activities, and (b) explore how ALIFE is associated with different attributes at the individual, household and neighbourhood levels, and how these relationships differ for children aged 10 and 11 years old across the three cities: Glasgow, Edinburgh and Hong Kong. We found environmental factors to be important indicators of lower AST, for example greater parking facility density. The most substantial contribution to children's overall ALIFE was household income, those from the lowest household group having almost 2 h less ALIFE per-week than those from the highest income.
Children's technologies of the self within neoliberal governmentality at the educational transition to in Zurich
Landolt L and Bauer I
Over the last two decades, research in children's geographies and governmentality studies have contributed significantly to the study of children's experiences in neoliberal educational contexts. This paper furthers this debate by examining the ways children govern and are governed within the neoliberal governmentality at the educational transition to : the only school that offers a direct path to university education within the state-funded school system in Switzerland. Drawing on an ethnography with eight students aged 13-15 during their preparation for the selective entrance examination to in Zurich, this article makes two points: Firstly, it demonstrates how Zurich's education system thrusts students into taking individual responsibility for their educational success at this transition Secondly, the article draws on Foucault's later work to explore the particular 'technologies of the self' that children adopt coping with this individualized responsibility. This paper argues that these technologies reveal insights into the neoliberal governmentality of this educational transition. Finally, the article argues to critically examine children's technologies of the self to understand their relationships with the education systems they navigate. This line of inquiry serves as a pathway to answer and expand earlier calls to grant children an active voice in research on education.