Recent decades have seen a growing emphasis, in a number of professional
contexts, on acknowledging and acting on the views of children. This
trend was given added weight by the UN Convention on the Rights of the
Child, ratified in 1990. Today, seeking the perspective of the child has
become an essential process in all sorts of tasks, from framing new
legislation to regulating professions.
This book answers the fundamental question of what it is that
constitutes a 'child perspective', and how this might differ from the
perspectives of children themselves. The answers to such questions have
important implications for building progressive and developmental
adult-child relationships. However, theoretical and empirical treatments
of child perspectives and children's perspectives are very diverse and
idiosyncratic, and the standard reference work has yet to be written.
Thus, this work is an attempt to fill the gap in the literature by
searching for and defining key formulations of potential child
perspectives within parts of the so-called 'new child paradigm'. This
has been derived from childhood sociology, contextual-relational
developmental psychology, interpretative humanistic psychology and
developmental pedagogy. The highly experienced authors develop a
comprehensive professional child perspective paradigm that integrates
recent theory and empirical child research. With its clear presentation
of underlying theories and suggested applications, this book illustrates
a child-oriented understanding of specific relevance to both child-care
and preschool educational practice.
