Children & Society最新文献

This paper examines how provincial-level policy innovation in China is reshaping educational access for migrant children, focusing on Sichuan's 2024 Implementation Plan for Strengthening the Care and Protection of Migrant Children. Rather than viewing the 2024 Plan in isolation, the analysis locates it within the evolving trajectory of China's hukou household registration reform and rural–urban labour migration. By tracing the link between national policy changes and demographic responses, it highlights how macro-level reforms created new conditions for local policy experimentation. It analyses both the Plan's emergence and its structural components. The plan is interpreted as a locally grounded effort to integrate previously disjointed services into a coordinated system, shaped by both top-down directives and local problem-solving. This case illustrates how provincial initiatives can function as adaptive strategies to national policy shifts, yet remain embedded in structural and legal constraints. The paper further reflects on the challenges of applying Western-derived policy frameworks in non-Western contexts. Drawing on comparative scholarship in postcolonial political theory, it calls for more contextually attuned approaches—ones that recognise the distinctive logic of Chinese governance, rather than evaluating it through universalist assumptions.

Despite the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child's emphasis on the major role of schools in providing for children's right to play, restrictions on children's play during breaktimes in schoolyards persist. A policy void has been highlighted in research examining the diverse interrelated nature of constraints on play rights in the unique context of schoolyard spaces. This research emphasises both the importance and limitations of policies and the need for further interrogation of broader educational policies as tools of influence in relation to play rights. This paper provides an exemplar of a critical review of national educational policies relevant to children's play in schoolyards in Ireland. The three-step review identified, extracted and charted representations of play during breaktimes in schoolyards from 24 legislative, policy and guidance documents. Lefebvre's (1991) theory of the production of social space informed the final analysis, focusing on the abstract representations of play in schoolyards, generating two themes: 1. No space for play—the prioritisation of supervision, safety and outdoor learning in representations of breaktimes in schoolyards and 2. Incongruence between inclusion rhetoric and a neglect of play rights. This review offers recommendations to progress the realisation of play rights in the Irish school context. It also contributes to contemporary scholarship on children's rights, highlighting the insights gained from examining the dominant ideas influencing priorities and regulating provision for play rights across educational policies.

RETRACTION: M. R. Bougar, S. H. M. Babaheydari, S. Khodarahimi, N. Mazraeh, and M. Sadeghi, “Behavioural Activation and Inhibition Systems of Fathers, Child Abuse and Childhood Psychopathology: The Mediating Role of Demographics,” Children & Society (Early View): https://doi.org/10.1111/chso.12929.

The above article, published online on 26 November 2024 in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com), has been retracted by agreement between the journal Editors, Liam Berriman, Deevia Bhana, Sarah Crafter, Martin Robb and Yuwei Xu; Wendy Sims-Schouten, chair of the Editorial Board; the National Children's Bureau; and John Wiley & Sons Ltd. The retraction has been agreed due to unreliable conclusions and ethical concerns about the study.

Shortly after publication, the editorial office identified problems regarding the ethical approval and safeguarding practices underlying the study. Concerns were raised about the age and vulnerabilities of the minors involved in the study, the ethical appropriateness of a questionnaire on experiences of paternal abuse, the lack of consideration around age-appropriate practices of informed consent, and general absence of safeguarding and trauma-informed practice in the study's design and implementation.

In a subsequent research integrity investigation, original data provided by the authors was incomplete and was inconsistent with the published results. Based on these inconsistencies, the results presented in this manuscript are considered unreliable. The ethics approval statement, which was obtained retrospectively by the authors, is also considered to be insufficient.

Overall, the editorial office express deep concerns over this research involving minors, the corresponding study approval process, and how consent for participation by legal guardians was obtained. This practice described in this article is considered a violation of our expectations regarding the well-being and safeguarding of vulnerable children and constitutes unethical research.

The authors disagree with the decision to retract.

The paper advances child-centred understandings of the governmentality of migration, drawing upon a British Academy funded study that ethnographically documented the lived experiences of unaccompanied asylum-seeking children (UASC) in Southern European borderlands. The findings shed light on the ensemble of discourses, of actors-state (border police force) and non-state (professionals Non-Governmental and Intergovernmental Organisations)- and technologies of power of age misidentification, detention and pushbacks implicated in the governmentality of unaccompanied child migration. The unaccompanied minors' narratives powerfully illuminate their (de)subjectification, as they navigate conditions characterised by liminality and hopelessness. It is argued that unaccompanied child migration is governed through border violence and de-subjectification, mediated and often disrupted by humanitarian actors, thereby restoring UASC's sense of humanness and hope.