Children's Geographies

Children’s geographies, one area of childhood studies, is an interdisciplinary sub-field comprising research by human geographers, educationalists, psychology, sociology, and other cognate disciplines. The 1989 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child defines childhood as a period until 18 years of age. However, work in this sub-field has more usually emphasised the social constructedness of childhood. Scholarship has drawn attention to the spatial, cultural, and historically situated ideas, laws, and policies that shape childhood and children’s experiences. It therefore can be seen to depart from biologically essentialist and chronological approaches to defining a child. Accordingly, there is no universal category of child or childhood given how children’s lives and experiences are shaped by social identity, such as gender, ethnicity, race, class, sexu- ality, disability, and different encounters with people and places. A plurality of ‘childhoods’ is conceptualised in social constructivist approaches. Childhood studies remains predominantly focused on a small number of countries in the Global North but recognises the marked global differences and inequalities in children’s lives. In acknowledgement of the blurred boundaries of childhood, youth, and adulthood, non-linearity of time in lived experience, and interpersonal and relational dimensions of children’s lives, more recent work has often favoured the expanded term ‘geographies of children, youth, and families’. This entry examines the develop- ment of children’s geographies and critiques of the field of study, how it has been informed by critical theory, and the specific relevance of children’s geographies to understanding children’s lives in the Global South.