Diverse childhoods: Implications for childcare, protection, participation and research practice

Abstract

Researchers have been known to complain that practitioners do not listen to their findings or recommendations, and have emphasised the importance of evidence-based practice. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, research concerning children produced a shift leading to a new sociological paradigm of childhood. This paradigm parallels the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), produced at the same time. Both productions emphasise common themes, which in the principles of the CRC are expressed as non-discrimination, children's participation and the best interests of the child. Sociological frameworks and the CRC were brought together in the growing movement to ‘child-rights programming’ (CRP) taken up by many UN and international children's agencies since the turn of the twenty-first century.¹

Citation

West, A., O’Kane, C. and Hyder, T. (2008), "Diverse childhoods: Implications for childcare, protection, participation and research practice", Leira, A. and Saraceno, C. (Ed.) Childhood: Changing Contexts (Comparative Social Research, Vol. 25), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 265-292. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0195-6310(07)00009-9