In this chapter, we analyze an action research project that took place in public space in a Brazilian city and that focused on children’s presence and participation in planning and construction of a square intended for playing. Our aim is to develop social actions to improve childhood citizenship in urban spaces in order to promote children’s right to the city (Lefebvre 2014). We focus on how children learn in social practice as part of a collective and everyday life process (Lave 2019). We understand that children’s disputes over using urban spaces as play spaces are an expression of social participation and an exercise of agency, a privileged process of “learning citizenship” (Lansky 2012: 26). Their concrete and continuous presence in urban spaces creates possibilities for producing “differential space” (Lefebvre 1991: 52). The starting point was the children’s invisible presence in the relevant territory, which fostered their “differential capacities” to combat “homogenizing powers” (Lefebvre 1980: 30).

This chapter discusses how MacDonald’s view of childhood played a significant part in making his view of life and death. MacDonald often writes in his works and in letters to his family that we do not lament the death of anyone whom we love, because death is an entrance to ‘more life’. This view can be attributed to MacDonald’s deep devotion to his Christian faith and his affinity for the German Romantics, but the process of his arriving at this firm belief could also be related to the intimate relationship with his family that he developed in childhood. Drawing from this biographical context, the chapter details two views of children in his works: children whose purity brings them inherently closer to God and children whose innocence manifests as stubbornness and ignorance, but who can mature with the help of others. It particularly considers Ranald Bannerman’s Boyhood (1871) and The Princess and Curdie (1883) to show how remembering childhood or inventing happy memories of childhood through storytelling helps the protagonists endure hard times and heal from spiritual disease.

George MacDonald’s major novels for children can be read as demonstrating shifts in the development of English children’s literature from the perspectives of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in relation to the approaches to moral education, the genre of fantasy, and awareness of social realities. Unlike his predecessors’ creations, MacDonald’s protagonists acquire agency; they engage with emotional and practical problems emanating from the immediacy of their social circumstances. The sophistication of the construction of his child characters and their interaction with their worlds, whether real or imagined, created the literary pathways for children’s writers to come, such as E. Nesbit (1858–1924), C. S. Lewis (1898–1963), J. R. R. Tolkien (1892–1973), and contemporary writers of fiction for children. The discussion focuses on signifying how his work relates to the history of English fiction for children through consideration of At the Back of the North Wind (1871), Ranald Bannerman’s Boyhood (1871), The Princess and the Goblin (1872), Gutta-Percha Willie (1873), and The Princess and Curdie (1883).

Chapter 5 investigates the networks of relationship that sustain individuals and communities in the poems. It addresses family, marriage, sexual desire and agency, male bonds and loyalty, and the expectations placed on women and men. It also considers childhood and old age, hospitality, and wider social connections, arguing that epic memory preserves not only heroic deeds but everyday forms of attachment and obligation.

Chapter 2 looks at how the Genesis 1 and related domination-oriented onto-stories compare with accounts of domestication that emphasize co-evolution and mutuality of humans and animals. It places human domestication of animals within a broader picture of forms of inter-species relations, including mutualistic symbiosis, parasitic symbiosis, commensalism and mixed categories.

Chapter 3 examines the Bible’s Garden of Eden story, an episode that connects male “rule” of women (Gen 3:16) with the human journey toward farming. This link of gender domination with domestication is well documented in many cultures, but the Eden origin story also insists that such domination is a fall from a more egalitarian ideal.

Routines are part of everyday life. Essentially a routine is a sequence of actions that is followed regularly, although not always with the same frequency. For example, some routines are part of every day, while others may occur weekly or even less frequently. Some people are comfortable with a framework of their day and prefer a flexible approach to routines. Others prefer a more rigid schedule, and routines are part of that fixed plan. However, there are some people who find routines challenging, and require additional support for these to be a successful part of the day. This chapter will explore some of the daily routines that are part of a child’s life, both within and outside the ECEC service. It will include what routines are, why they are important, challenges some children (and adults) might experience, and strategies that may provide additional support for routines to become less difficult, and more seamlessly embedded in the day.

When we think about inclusion in early childhood education, our minds often turn immediately to children with disabilities. While supporting children with diverse abilities remains crucial, true inclusion extends far beyond this single lens. Inclusion is fundamentally about creating environments where every child, regardless of their cultural background, family circumstances, language or life experiences, can belong, participate and thrive.

Chapter 1 explores young women’s experiences growing up in their fathers’ households to situate this group in a broader understanding of social reproduction in urban Nigeria. At the heart of the chapter lies young women’s recognition that they must live up to their parents’ expectations of becoming eligible ‘wife material’ but that this process is complicated by their desires to conform to particular cosmopolitan identities as well as by interferences coming from ‘the village’. The chapter details young women’s childhood memories and the domestic challenges faced by the ‘girl child’ in urban Nigeria, before moving on to describe the various strategies young women have for managing their reputations as they seek to have fun in the city and look towards a future shaped by marital responsibility. Illuminating how social reproduction in Calabar is governed by the tensions of visibility and invisibility, the chapter highlights how it is not only the boundaries of feminine respectability that start at home but also the ways in which feminine identities can be shaped by uncertainty.

Elizabeth Maconchy inhabited a variety of different worlds. She was a female composer at a time when there were considerably fewer of them than their male counterparts; she was a wife and mother; she was English born to Irish parents, spending much of her childhood in Ireland before moving back to England as a teenager to study at the Royal College of Music; and she had a life-changing bout of tuberculosis in an era when the treatment largely involved cold, fresh air and a retreat from hard work. These worlds, as well as the colourful and thrilling variety of Maconchy’s music, are explored in Maconchy in Context, the first in the series to be devoted to a female composer.

This chapter examines Elizabeth Maconchy’s children’s operas, situating them alongside other works she composed especially for children and young audiences. Much like Benjamin Britten, Maconchy saw the inherent value, intellect, and presence of self in children and youth, and thus did not patronise them in her compositions. Children’s opera can essentially be subdivided into three categories of works: those written about, those written for, and those written with children as the primary audience, subject, or participants. Broadly speaking, children’s operas may coalesce any of the three sets, resulting in an opera that is for an audience of children, about a child- or childhood-focused theme, and performed by a cast or cast members who are children. Justin Vickers examines Maconchy’s children’s operas as an integral facet of her compositional output not to be overlooked, and the milieu proved to be a catalyst for Maconchy’s abundant well of musical creativity. Moreover, these works may be positioned in the broader educational initiatives in music and the arts throughout the British Isles.

This chapter argues that educators need to have a good grasp of all the various forms of pre-adulthood that we take for granted, such as ‘the child’ and ‘the youth’. These categories are the focus of a range of different disciplines, most of which found their explanatory models in nature itself. As such, the behaviour of children and youth may be deemed to require explanation, but not the very existence of the categories themselves. The issues raised in this chapter concern the degree to which childhood and youth are actually socially constructed categories that serve particular social functions. Of greatest interest here are the ways in which childhood and youth are both artefacts of, and vehicles for, social governance.

Elizabeth Bowen’s fiction is full of girls; in nearly all her work, she focuses on the act of maturing through adolescence to early adulthood. The experience of girlhood among Bowen’s characters maps onto the generic characteristics of her truncated, ambiguous Bildungsromane, all of which subvert expectations and resist satisfying maturation. Her novels focus on figures experiencing historical and emotional arrest, and her adolescent girls often remain in moments of developmental or social suspension. This essay traces girlhood and adolescence in abeyance in Bowen’s short fiction, and in novels ranging from The Hotel to The Death of the Heart to The Little Girls.