The Right to Childhoods: Critical Perspectives on Rights, Difference and Knowledge in a Transient World - Softcover

'The Right to Childhoods provides a way of reviewing how we have been approaching childhood using research from different countries to see if our perceptions of children have adapted to the world we live in today. The author conveys her sense of urgency and belief that this is a global concern that should be emphasized rather than overlooked.' Cristina Limlingan, Herr Research Center for Children and Social Policy, Erikson Institute, USA, in Comparative Education Review Reviewed in Children & Society, 2010 "This book is an ambitious project that addresses four large themes for childhood in the 21st century - rights, transience, difference and knowledge - bringing to bear on them a critical perspective and a wealth of inter-disciplinary knowledge. Dimitra Hartas has made a cogent argument for the right to childhoods and an important contribution to a rapidly developing field."--Sanford Lakoff

In this study, Dimitra Hartas analyses contemporary childhood. She discusses the plurality inherent in childhood and the forces that shape children's experience of growing up in the 21st century. She engages with new lines of argument about diversity, difficulty and difference, and critiques the issues that affect children's quality of life such as market-driven values, poverty and civic engagement. Hartas shows how the right to childhood is being violated in both the developed and the developing world and how our consumerist culture is shaping children's lives in ways that are not always understood, and she advocates the rights to childhoods. She concludes by discussing policy and practice in early childhood education, and examines pedagogies that are responsive to ethics, diversity and difference.