Key Constructs: Politics, Policies and Process

Abstract

Globalisation has done more for children than make the hamburger available worldwide. It has revealed a great diversity in childhood experiences, both inter- and intra-culturally, with television and other media providing visual evidence of this on an almost daily basis. Differences in children’s everyday lives are, in this sense at least, taken-for-granted, with some childhoods, however, becoming problematised as ‘incorrect’, as the public display of children as child workers, or as hunger stricken refugees or child soldiers in Africa, serves to sharpen ideas about what a proper childhood ought to be (see Ennew 1986 and Chapter 4).