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Children's Geographies
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Children and young people's

relationships, relational processes and
social change: reading across worlds
a a
Lynn Jamieson & Sue Milne
a
Centre for Research on Families and Relationships, University of
Edinburgh , 23 Buccluech Place, Edinburgh , UK
Published online: 18 Jul 2012.

To cite this article: Lynn Jamieson & Sue Milne (2012) Children and young people's relationships,
relational processes and social change: reading across worlds, Children's Geographies, 10:3,
265-278, DOI: 10.1080/14733285.2012.693377

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 Children’s Geographies
Vol. 10, No. 3, August 2012, 265 –278

Children and young people’s relationships, relational processes and social

change: reading across worlds
Lynn Jamieson∗ and Sue Milne

Centre for Research on Families and Relationships, University of Edinburgh, 23 Buccluech Place,
Edinburgh, UK
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We begin by defining relationships and relational processes, before presenting children’s

personal relationships, and the relational processes making them personal, as of particular
significance in shaping selves and social worlds. This sets the scene for the relevance of
children and young people’s personal relationships compared across Majority and Minority
Worlds to debates about global social change. This includes claims characterising change in
terms of ‘individualisation’, ‘democratisation’ and ‘commercialisation’. The authors’ work
on children’s adult –child relationship in public places and on children and young people’s
experiences of parent precipitated family household change in a Minority World context is
briefly compared to insights from studies of Majority World street children and of children
and young people with migrant parents in the Majority World.
Keywords: relationships; children; globalization; family; transnational; individualization;
democracy; commercialisation

Introduction
Social science research on children and childhood has set new agendas with distinctive literatures
and specialists emerging across a number of disciplines, but, as Strandell (2010) observes, the
insights of this work often remain somewhat detached from mainstream theorising. We believe
that work on children and young people’s relationships should be central to a comprehensive
understanding of social change; the quality of children and young people’s personal relationships
is particularly relevant to claims about radical re-orientations of social values and social inte-
gration made using such encompassing terms as ‘individualisation’, ‘democratisation’ and ‘com-
mercialisation’, suggesting very wide-spread and perhaps global trends.
We begin by defining relationships, re-asserting that personal relationships are key sites for
the transmission of social values, social integration or exclusion and social reproduction including
the reproduction of equality and inequality. In the task of assessing arguments about social change
and its reach, we advocate looking holistically and comparatively at children and young people’s
personal relationships and relational processes that help us to construct the social boundaries and
hierarchies of their local-in-the-global worlds. Drawing on our own research on children and
young people’s relationships with adults (Milne 2009a, 2009b) and their experiences of family
change (Highet and Jamieson 2007, Jamieson and Highet forthcoming), we look comparatively
at Majority World research with a similar substantive focus from very different contexts. This pro-
vides modest illustrations that gestures towards the ways in which studies of children and young

∗
Corresponding author. Email: lynn.jamieson@ed.ac.uk

ISSN 1473-3285 print/ISSN 1473-3277 online

# 2012 Taylor & Francis
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14733285.2012.693377
http://www.tandfonline.com
 266 L. Jamieson and S. Milne

people’s relationships can contribute to assessments of claimed global trends, hopefully encoura-
ging others to take this much further.

Relationships and relational processes

It is telling that, in his insightful reflections on ‘What is a Relationship’, the anthropologist Miller
(2007) does not actually offer a definition. At its simplest, a relationship is some form of conse-
quential or significant connection. The vernacular and academic use of the term in English
suggests that for a connection between particular humans to be recognised as ‘a relationship’,
this involves a durable pattern of social interaction that is meaningful to those engaged in it
and would be acknowledged and recognised as a type of relationship by them (Morgan 2009).
The social science literature contains long established and well-developed accounts that do
exclude some relational processes creating human connection from this definition of relationship.
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For example, George Simmel’s crowds (Wolf 1950) and Goffman’s (1961) encounters are tran-
sient gatherings and fleeting interactions with minimal legacy of durable mutual acknowledge-
ment. Both can, nevertheless, establish routine iterative aspects of social life (Giddens 1984)
but, unlike personal relationships, the quality of connections between particular people is not
what makes them consequential.
Personal relationships, from acquaintances to the closest intimates, have been singled out in
classical social theory as fundamental to ‘ontological security’, a secure sense of an agentic self,
of a place in the social world, and of basic trust in others. Personal relationships, particularly
parent – child relationships, retain central place in contemporary analysis of the social construction
of subjectivity and identity drawing on the sociological traditions of phenomenology (Schutz
1932), symbolic interactionism (Mead 1927), as well as a number of social psychological tra-
ditions including those building on psychoanalysis (Freud 1930). While, in the psychoanalytic
conceptualisation of the self, dispositions become resistant to change from early childhood, the
other traditions allow more room for the reshaping of selves in personal – social interaction
across biographies. Recognition of children and young people as competent social actors,
rather than passively moulded by socialisation, also developed from symbolic interactionism
(Denzin 1971, Buhler-Niederberger 2010, p. 159).
Morgan (2009) has drawn attention to the continuum, from acquaintances to ‘close’ relation-
ships, in the relational processes building quality. A singling out of the quality of one personal
relationship without attention to the wider constellation is unlikely to provide a maximum value
in attempts to understand social change (Allan 1979, Carsten 2004, see van Blerk 2012). The
concept of relational processes suggests a focus on the interactive practices that build relationships’
quality. Morgan (1999, 2011a, 2011b) has theorised the practices constructing family relationships
and Jamieson (1998, 2005, 2011) has focused on practices of intimacy. The repertoire of practices
that Jamieson identifies as having the potential to create intimacy, as she also acknowledges, are not
specific to this purpose. They can be regarded as more general processes building the quality of a
relationship – practical sharing and caring, taking pleasure in time spent in association, mutual self-
disclosing talk developing familiarity and privileged knowledge associated with trust, emotional
attachment and emotional ‘closeness’, expressing affection and love. One way of looking compara-
tively across different worlds is to look at how relational processes are deployed in differing degrees
and combinations in indigenous ways to create differing qualities of personal relationships and
constellations of personal relationships in specific cultural and historical contexts.

The local – global of personal relationships

Theoretical approaches giving primacy to personal relationships in the shaping of subjectivity and
social integration need not underplay the power of more abstract and pervasive systems (Jamieson
 Children’s Geographies 267

2011). Relational processes, including those of childhood, are integrated into local, societal and
global systems reproducing or resisting social inequalities including ‘patriarchy’, the simul-
taneous differentiation and hierarchical ordering of men and women, adults and children and
young people. Relational processes and practices of intimacy are also enmeshed in, productive
of, or resistant to inequalities of class (Gillies 2005, 2007, Hansen 2005, Lareau 2003), as well
as generational power (Whitehouse 2009) and gender (Hirsch 2007). Any comparison of children
and young people’s personal relationships across local contexts within the rich Minority World
versus the Majority World requires attendance to the economic, political and cultural systems
expressing and expressed by the conventional ‘generational social order’ between children,
young people and adults (Buhler-Niederberger 2010) and the ‘family – sex – gender system’
(Therborn 2004).
As the term ‘globalisation’ suggests, local change is always in interaction with or infused by
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systems with a global reach. The persistence of distinctive local – global patterns are expressed in
geographically specific ‘family – sex – gender systems’. Capitalism (its system of production, its
markets and its socio-technical systems of moving capital, and labour, advertising and distributing
mass produced goods) is arguably the most pervasively consequential global system. The wealthy
nations of Europe, and the European-settler societies of North America, Australia and New
Zealand, benefiting from histories combining capitalist development with colonial exploitation,
have established complex welfare states moderating the potential exploitations of a capitalist
system. Although their welfare regimes vary in the extent to which they reduce adult reliance
upon the labour-market (Esping-Andersen 1990) and their harms and benefits remain debated
(Jamieson and Cunningham-Burley 2003), all would claim to ensure the protection and nurturing
of children. The access of children to universal education systems and their relative exclusion
from labour markets in the Minority World contrasts with the situation of many children in the
Majority World. Many Majority World families remain in subsistence household economies
where the manual work of all, including children, is needed for survival; the flow of migration
to contexts offering wages, or higher wages is, simultaneously, an aspect of the capitalist
system, and a family and personal strategy (Therborn 2011).
The categorisation of Minority and Majority Worlds suggests capitalist development with
very different local economies, markets and welfare regimes. However, it is the significant
social divisions such as gender and socio-economic class within the Majority or Minority
World which typically shape personal life challenges such as making an adequate living to
raise children or the experience of growing up and its associated life chances. Across Worlds,
poor children are more likely to experience forms of state intervention concerned with surveil-
lance and social control than with their entitlement to a nurturing environment; their expectations
of education are lower than those of children and young people in more advantaged circum-
stances. Systems of communication technologies mediate increasing numbers of personal
relationships across Worlds with consequence which remain debated (Jamieson forthcoming,
Urry 2002, Valentine 2006) but the poorest sectors of society remain the least able to participate
in opportunities afforded by the digital revolutions. Similarly, capacities for mobility vary with
socio-economic position (e.g. Huang and Yeoh 2005, Magazine and Sanchez 2007, Porter
et al. 2010) along with the take up of opportunities for migration between the Majority and
Minority Worlds captured by descriptive terms such as ‘economic migrants’ and ‘global care
chains’ (Ehrenreich and Hochschild 2003, Lan 2006).
Poor working-class young people are the most likely to retain an economic significance as
gendered workers for their parental family-household in the Minority World (e.g. Dodson and
Dickert 2004), a part played by most working-class children until the late twentieth century1;
most contemporary children in the Majority World contribute labour to their family-household
economy. Conventional divisions of labour in the Majority World often translate into parents
 268 L. Jamieson and S. Milne

making heavier demands on girls and girls’ mobilities are often further constrained by fears of
sexual impropriety or gender violence (e.g. Porter et al. 2010). However, Majority World children
from elite privileged backgrounds lead lives that are as segregated from participation in economic
activities as their equivalents in the Minority World. Some childhoods are characterised by
highly constrained mobility, particularly those of girls in contexts practising purdah, from
typically privileged high-status groups (Winkelman 2007).
Although it may not be possible to speak of a global culture framing personal relationships,
there are globally circulating discourses potentially modifying the quality of personal relation-
ships. One example is the universalising human rights discourse formally adopted by supra-
state body of the United Nations, albeit children’s rights and women’s rights have very different
meanings in different localities, sometimes taken up and fought for by grassroots organisations,
sometimes fiercely contested as an alien attack on local morality and custom (Mohanty 2003, see
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Tisdall and Punch this volume). Recurrent romantic themes of popular culture produced in both
Hollywood and Bollywood provide another example (e.g. Banaji 2006, Uberoi 2006). Everyday
life may be relatively untouched by such official declarations as United Nations Convention on
the Rights of the Child but some social science observers see an increasing emphasis on intimacy
in personal relationships as consistent with themes of global popular culture (Hirsch and Wardlow
2006, Padilla et al. 2007, Hansen and Pang 2008, 2010, Cole and Thomas 2009). Theoretical
analysis of social change linking intimacy and democratisation by Giddens (1990, 1992) and con-
tributions of Beck and Beck-Gernsheim (2001, 2004, 2010) have been particularly influential. It
cannot be presumed, however, that increased intimacy means democracy and equality (Jamieson
1998, 2011).
A more pessimistic analysis of cultural tendencies stresses a capitalist fuelled atomising indi-
vidualisation and the ‘commercialisation’ or ‘commodification’ of relationships, draining the
moral cohesion of families and communities (Bellah et al. 1985, Sennett 1998, 2006, Bauman
2001, 2003, 2005, also elements of the previously cited work by Beck). Concern about the cor-
rosive impact of these presumed corollaries of capitalism and free market neo-liberalism spans
Majority and Minority Worlds, although the specifics of the concern take different forms. Equality
is not a universally accepted ideal and, for some political leaders and moral commentators, their
greatest fears are the undermining of patriarchal sex/gender systems (Altman 2001) or ‘filial
piety’ (Yan 2010); concerns about social disorder recurrently attributed to unruly youth
(Pearson 1983) are expressed across Majority and Minority Worlds. Children and young
people’s intergenerational relationships across Majority and Minority Worlds are an important
source of evidence concerning such popular fears and academic claims, illustrating forms of soli-
darity and hierarchy across generations and more or less continuity or change. As Vanderbeck
(2007) suggests, much is to be gained from looking at the ways in which members of different
generational groups engage with each other rather than simply focusing on spatial and social
segregation (see also Hopkins and Pain 2007).

Child– adult relationships in Minority and Majority Worlds

The idea of there being a ‘right’ place for children and young people in physical as well as social
terms is one that informs much of adult thinking across the globe (Cahill 1990, Hillman et al.
1990, Buhler-Niederberger 2010). In many Minority World societies, public rhetoric suggest
that the ‘right’ places for children and young people are away from most public spaces, which
are largely defined as ‘adult territories’, and in the home, school or organised leisure facilities
(see Alanen 2001, Rasamussen and Smidt 2003, Zeiher 2003, Valentine 2004). In some contexts,
even children’s childhood activity of play is no longer unprogrammed or controlled by those
engaged in it; instead it is organised, structured and commercialised by adults (Alder and
 Children’s Geographies 269

Alder 1994, Mayall 1998, 2001, Jones and Cunningham 1999, McKendrick et al. 2000, Smith
and Barker 2000, Chawla and Malone 2003). One of the ironies of British childhood is the cel-
ebration of children as ‘making a family’ coincides with subjecting them to suspicion and hostility
if they are seen as ‘out of place’ (Milne 2009b). In the UK, traffic danger and the campaign
warning children and young people of ‘stranger danger’ contributes to the adult view of public
spaces as ‘naturally’ or ‘normally’ adult spaces (Valentine 2004, p. 27). While the exclusion of
children and young people from public space is often critiqued as inappropriately denying
their agency, there is no settled support for a general abolition of age-specific restrictions segre-
gating children and young people from adults and little constructive academic discussion of such
issues (Vanderbeck 2008).

Child– adult relationships in public

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Minority World studies suggest that, as in the Majority World, there is variation in effective
restrictions on children and young people’s mobilities through public spaces (Hillman et al.
1990, Jones and Cunningham 1999, O’Brien et al. 2000, O’Brien 2003, Rasamussen and
Smidt 2003). Milne’s (2009b) UK study explored 10- and 11-year-old children’s experiences
and conceptualisations of child – adult relations beyond home and school, in the context of
growing up in working-class housing estates characterised by multiple deprivation and suffering
reputational stigma. Many aspects of their experience would be similar for children growing up in
equivalently disadvantaged housing estates of any European or North American city. Most were
growing up in households without a car and many spent much of their out of school time walking
alone or with friends around their neighbourhood, in the streets or public spaces, and travelling on
public transport to other parts of the city independently of adults. Class prejudice was one of the
contexts framing relationships with adults when they travelled beyond their area (just as racism
impacts on ethnic minority children from such neighbourhoods), enhancing the likelihood of chil-
dren being treated with hostility and suspicion. Mobility was, nevertheless, important for devel-
oping friendly child – adult relationships that sometimes subverted adult – child hierarchies: ‘They
think that we’re their slaves sometimes. Sometimes they treat us like normal . . . like other adults,
but smaller, mini-adults’ (James quoted in Milne 2009b, p. 243).
Despite the message of ‘don’t talk to strangers’ from schools, parents and the media, British
children and young people adopt ways of identifying ‘safer’ people (Harden 2000, Spilsbury
2002, Valentine 2004). For the children in Milne’s study, conversation was safe with recognised
acquaintances. They used the Scottish term to ‘ken’2 to mean knowing something about a person:
their name, where they live or their links to other known people. Acquaintances and close
relationships were often interconnected as they include friends of their parents or their friends’
parents. Children’s familiar connections with acquaintances worked alongside their much
closer relationships with family and friends to construct their sense of belonging to their neigh-
bourhood and their social identities in the world beyond home and school.
The mobility of poor children and young people in the Majority World is often to carry out
economic activity on behalf of the family household. Play has to be incorporated into schedules
and mobility serving household needs (e.g. Dyson 2010). An exception is found in children and
young people who have left their family-households to live independently on the streets. Such
children and young people are frequently stigmatised and socially excluded and their strategies
for survival include activities that are in themselves stigmatising, such as drug, alcohol and sub-
stance use, stealing and begging. ‘The streets’ are seen as corrupting whether in Bangladesh
(Conticini and Hulme 2007), Indonesia (Beazley 2000) Northern Brazil (Hecht 1998), Nepal
(Baker 2000) or Victorian and Edwardian London (Davin 1996). Even run-away children and
young people sometimes succeed in maintaining positive relationships with adults, for example,
 270 L. Jamieson and S. Milne

through contacts with a parent, a kin member or former neighbour who subvert their stigmatised
categorisation and keep open the possibility of transcending their identity as street child (Baker
2000, Conticini and Hulme 2007, see van Blerk 2012).
In their experiences of child–adult interaction, working-class Minority World children and
young people from deprived neighbourhoods like those participating in the research by Milne,
may have more in common with Majority World children and young people than with their
middle-class peers. Across Minority and Majority Worlds, poor children aged 10 and 11 are ‘out
and about’ in public for long periods while privileged peers are segregated in protected adult-super-
vised worlds. But being ‘out and about’ does not achieve anything approaching equal status with
adults, whatever the reasons for their mobility. Even where children and young people are regarded
as having legitimate economic reasons for occupying public space, as is common in the Majority
World, they cannot take it for granted that stranger adults will treat them with respect. Across
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Worlds, children and young people develop strategies for identifying and developing acquaintances
with safe and friendly adults and skills in avoiding the dangerous and dealing with the hostile, often
sharing knowledge and skills. However, visibly identifying with a peer group in public, such as
through styles of dress, or being seen to act as a group, often causes further stigmatisation and hos-
tility from adults. The hostile treatment of children and young people being seen to act indepen-
dently of adult-defined appropriate behaviour indicates persistence of generational hierarchies
across Minority and Majority Worlds. Without effective systematic support for their rights to auton-
omy in public space, children and young people’s capacities to negotiate pleasant adult–child
relationships in public remain ‘weapons of the weak’: i.e., subverting adult–child hierarchies
rather than effecting their radical transformation.

Disrupted parent – child relationships

Research on the quality of children and young people’s relationships in the wake of disruption of
family and domestic arrangements is a fruitful point to look comparatively across Majority and
Minority Worlds. Such disruptions are often treated as evidence of the direction of social
change. For example, moral entrepreneurs point to street children as evidence of children and
young people’s willingness to abandon their responsibilities to their family household, although
the continued compliance of the overwhelming majority suggests the weakness of the argument
(Hecht 1988). Comparative evidence will provide a better basis for adjudicating between claims
about disruption, for example, as evidence of destructive individualisation and commercialisation
on the one hand, and as windows of opportunity for more equal and democratic relationships, on
the other. The research that is our focus deals with forms of intergenerational and familial disrup-
tion precipitated by parents and experienced by many children. In parts of the Majority World, the
absence of a parent or parents because of economic migration is very common leaving significant
large proportions of children and young people brought up by a lone parent or carers standing-in
for migrant parents3. In contrast, for significant proportions of children and young people in parts
of the Minority World, the main disruption to their family households and access to their parents is
the upheaval of parental divorce or separation. We draw on UK children and young people’s
experience of absent fathers following the divorce or separation of their parents from a study nick-
named Cool with Change4 (Highet and Jamieson 2007, Jamieson and Highet 2012) and published
research on the views and experiences of children and young people left behind by migrant fathers
and/or mothers in the Philippines (Parreñas 2005) and in Mexico (Dreby 2010).

Children and young people’s views of love and care

Across the three research contexts, the absences of a mother and of a father are regarded as creat-
ing somewhat different deficits for children and young people, albeit that gender beliefs are more
 Children’s Geographies 271

muted within the Minority World; mothers typically do more everyday caring work for children
and young people, and being a good provider is regarded as the particular duty of a father. In the
UK, fathers often fail to make routine financial payments following divorce or separation
(Bradshaw et al. 1999) and when they do pay children and young people report this as evidence
of continued love and care. However, children typically refer to more than this in claiming a ‘good
relationship’ with a father. They also typically have expectations of intimacy demonstrated by
spending time with them, engaging with details of their lives and doing things with and for
them (e.g. Warin et al. 1999, Featherstone 2009, Doucet 2006 for a similar discussion regarding
North America). A frequently adopted pattern of spending time with their father among Cool with
Change research participants is face-to-face fortnightly visits but not all successfully kept in touch
or had the means to manage this proactively, for example, being unable to maintain regular credit
on their phone. Children make harsh judgements when they perceived fathers as unwilling to give
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appropriate time: ‘he seems to have enough time for her [her father’s girlfriend] but not enough
time for his own flesh and blood’ (Julia Cool with Change, aged 14).
Interviews with children and young people of migrant parents in the Philippines (Parreñas
2005) and Mexico (Dreby 2010) indicate that Filipino and Mexican children and young people
typically presume that if a migrant father is sending back money then he loves them. On the
other hand, gender beliefs mean that migrant mothers have to actively persuade children and
young people that their remittances are an act of love. Migrant mothers use a wide repertoire
of practices of intimacy providing practical and emotional care from a distance, making frequent
effective use of mediated communication to express love and explicitly remind children and
young people of the sacrifice and suffering of working away from them. Mothers’ communicative
caring strategies are often effective over the long-term but some children and young people
became less accepting of the sufficiency of fathers-as-provider, suggesting some blurring of
expectations of intimacy with mothers and fathers; for example, Parreñas (2005) cites a child
lamenting her father’s unrealistic expectations concerning her education attainment as stemming
from the impossibility of him knowing or understanding her. Across Minority and Majority
Worlds, disruption of parenting puts a spotlight on the otherwise often taken for granted
gender divisions of caring and providing, sometimes encouraging questioning of sex gender
systems.

Individualisation
Parental absence following divorce and migration seems to heighten children and young people’s
awareness of their part in a domestic household economy rather than ‘individualisation’. In much
of the Minority World, and in contrast to much of the Majority World, many school-age children
and young people have little responsibility for household labour or family economy, although
there is considerable variation (see, e.g. Solberg 1990, Dodson and Dickert 2004), and some evi-
dence that children and young people in lone parent households make more significant contri-
butions than those living with two parents (Goldscheider and Waite 1991). Following their
parents’ separation, children and young people report noticing financial difficulties or their
mother’s heavier burden of paid and unpaid work. This often translates into willingness to
enhance their own participation in domestic work, self-censoring consumption towards frugality,
and, in some cases, anticipating how their future earnings will help the household economy
(Highet and Jamieson 2007, see also Solberg 1990, Brannen et al. 2000, Ribbens McCarthy
et al. 2000, Smart et al. 2001, Smart 2006).
In contrast, many Majority World children and young people, particularly in less affluent
homes, are routinely expected to make contributions to their household, have more constant
awareness of the importance of being team players and work to offset the burden of their own
 272 L. Jamieson and S. Milne

care: ‘simultaneously deployed in family labor systems and positioned as dependents requiring
care’ (Orellana et al. 2001, p. 581). The literature on children and young people left by
migrant parents suggests that, in many Majority World contexts, they are reminded by their
carers of being a financial burden, their need to contribute and the importance of their parents’
remittances: themes concisely illustrated by a taunt thrown at a child in her grandparents’
house in the Caribbean because of her mother’s failure to send money, ‘your mother doesn’t
have a rusty nail in this home’ (Olwig 1999, p. 275). In Mexico and the Philippines, parental
migration significantly increased some children and young people’s (often gendered) contri-
butions to their households; for example, older teenage girls reported pressure to provide care
for younger siblings and sometimes carried very onerous responsibilities (Parreñas 2005,
Dreby 2010). While children and young people in the UK felt they were volunteering to do
more to help their mother following their father’s departure, daughters of migrants were more
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likely to feel under supported and over burdened.

Democratisation
Children and young people’s accounts suggest moderation of the power differences between
themselves and their parents following parental absence from their households. Even in the sup-
posedly more democratic Minority World context, this falls short of a form of ‘democratisation’ of
family relationships, such that children and young people have an equal voice as far as is reason-
ably possible (Giddens 1990, 1992). UK children and young people are used to bargaining and
find ways of using their separated parents’ differences in permissiveness to advantage. Teenagers
in Mexico with migrant parents similarly use ambiguity about who is in charge and differences
between the permissiveness of their local care givers and their parents to challenge authority
(Dreby 2010). These reported strategies again seem more akin to using the ‘weapons of the
weak’ than a process of bidding for equal relationships.
In the Cool with Change study, fathers are more often seen as the more flexible or lenient
parent. Conventional gender divisions of labour contribute to this view, because mothers more
often do routine everyday practical care, allowing fathers more possibility of specialising in
fun and treats. Also, non-resident fathers may be more anxious to please because they feel inse-
cure about their children and young people’s affections, and this enhances children and young
people’s bargaining position. Dreby reports that Mexican migrant parents ‘often attempt to
develop rapport with teenagers from afar, via friendship rather than parental authority’ (2010,
p. 124) because distance and length of separation means they cannot take their children and
young people’s affections for granted.
Nevertheless, children and young people had had very little say over the initial arrangements
for migration and their subsequent care in Mexico or the Philippines or in initial arrangements for
seeing their father and the pattern of care adopted by their parents following ‘split-up’ in the UK.
Some, particularly among the older UK children and young people, had subsequently expressed
views and negotiated modifications. However, these cases are matched by children and young
people who were fitting in and keeping quiet, despite being unhappy. Across these very different
contexts, the expectations of most children and young people, particularly the younger children,
were far short of equal relationships with their parents.

Commercialisation
While in both Majority and Minority World contexts an absent parent’s financial provision is
often presented and received as evidence of love, children and young people also demonstrated
acute awareness that relationship should not be reduced to a monetarised exchange. Children and
 Children’s Geographies 273

young people’s comments sometimes suggest tipping points between feeling loved, bribed and
bought (see also Thorne et al. 2003, Haugen 2005, Zelizer 2005, Pugh 2009). Some UK children
and young people noted that, when their parents split up and lived apart, they were given ‘more
presents’ which they mainly saw in terms of reassurances of love. For Mexican children and
young people who had been separated from their parents for long periods, gifts intended as evi-
dence of love and care sometimes demonstrated emotional distance because they were age inap-
propriate. Dreby (2010) suggests that children and young people were reluctant to make requests
for specific items because of sensitivity to the damaging connotations of apparently extorting gifts
from their parents.
Research participants also made distinctions between gifts as acts of love and as ways of
advancing self-interest. UK children and young people sometimes judge gifts cynically as
being in lieu of genuine care, evidenced by the absence of any other practices of intimacy.
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Kay, for example, excluded her father from her definition of ‘family’ because he repeatedly
failed to give her time. She complained about a Christmas visit to give her money and then
leave, saying: ‘He thinks that’s the only reason I’ve got to see him, it’s for money’ (Kay, Cool
with Change aged 13). Mexican and Filipina children and young people who received money
for their education were often told by parents to study hard. Children and young people could
experience the implied exchange as burdensome and an unhappy substitute for a loving resident
parent. Parreñas (2005) suggests that some children and young people experienced their relation-
ship with a parent as commodified, reduced to the purchaser of their education. Both Parreñas
(2005) and Dreby (2010) record children and young people complaining that their capacity to
take advantage of education is undermined by the absence of parental support at home. Only
those with intensive support from a local network of care from kin, friends and helpers were
likely to have confidence about educational success.

Concluding remarks
Our aim is to refocus attention on children and young people’s personal relationships as playing
key parts in constructing selves and social worlds and in effecting social change. The first section
offers a definition of ‘relationship’, reasserting the significance of personal relationships and
suggesting a conceptual focus and approach before briefly summarising some key themes con-
cerning social change. Our advocacy of attention to the relational processes of ‘practices of inti-
macy’ is appropriate to current debates about social change without neglect of systems with a
local-to-global reach. Subsequent sections offer modest illustrations pointing to the relevance
of studies of the quality of children and young people’s relationships to evidencing and refining
claims about global changes, such as those captured by the terms ‘individualisation’, ‘democra-
tisation’ and ‘commercialisation’. We take up the challenge of dialogue across worlds (Panelli
et al. 2007), drawing on research literature on children and young people’s personal relationships
from Majority and Minority Worlds to match the global scope of such claims.
Rather than adding to work directly contesting the premises of claims about ‘individualisa-
tion’, ‘democratisation’ and ‘commercialisation’ or repeating the extensive critiques developed
in particular national contexts5, we provide brief illustrations from empirical research reading
comparatively ‘across Worlds’. These are insufficient to fully map qualities and constellations
of personal relationships in each context or their integration with local – global systems. Neverthe-
less, although the focus was on adult –child relationships and parent– child relationships, some
reference is made to the wider networks of personal relationships and integration with local –
global systems such as labour markets, education and welfare regimes.
The reported research with children in a low-income housing estate reminds us of the many
children and young people whose relationships and journeys are not contained within the
 274 L. Jamieson and S. Milne

normative vision ‘normal childhoods’. It also shows that even in a national cultural context which
emphasises children’s rights, equality and intimate parent – child relationships, working-class
children and young people can face adult hostility and stigmatisation for being children ‘out of
place’. In our final section, we present research documenting how children and young people
feel about change in their family life involving interruption of parent – child co-residence. With
respect to ‘democratisation’, children and young people’s accounts suggest some levelling of
the power differences between themselves and their parents following parental separation or
migration. However, they more often take the form of bargaining for concessions from a position
of subordination than an assault on parental authority.
Gendered notions about parenting have proved remarkably resistant to change but this reading
across Minority and Majority Worlds suggests how the very different ‘typical’ biographical dis-
ruptions of creating absent parents in each can nudge children and young people to see the pro-
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vider role of their mothers and to desire greater emotional intimacy with their fathers. This in turn
may encourage questioning of divisions of labour that help underpin hierarchies of gender and
generation even in contexts which the family – sex – gender system inscribes very traditional
roles. It seems that parental absence in the context of continued kin care is more likely to heighten
children and young people’s awareness of interdependence and intensify their participation in col-
lective responsibility than to foster an individualisation that undermines it. However, honouring
mutual family responsibility has historically coexisted with an individualist sense of being an
individual proprietor of one’s own person in the Minority World while in parts of the Majority
World such views would be claimed as a form of ‘collective values’ that are the antithesis of indi-
vidualism. Finally, there is little support in the evidence for the ‘commercialisation’ thesis. The
danger of a child– parent relationship contracting to a commercial exchange surfaces in children
and young people’s accounts only when other practices of intimacy are absent.
In combination, the evidence presented in the final section suggests that while ‘individualisa-
tion’, ‘democratisation’ and ‘commodification’ capture issues relevant to the lives of children and
young people in Majority and Minority World contexts, it may be more helpful to see them as
short-hand labels for resonant discourses than as descriptors of the dynamic of social change.
The similarities suggested by this brief comparative reading of empirical research across
Worlds are not conclusive but a gesture towards what could be achieved; they provide grounds
for both pessimism and optimism regarding children as agents effecting positive social change
through personal relationships.

Acknowledgements
Particular thanks to the children who participated in our research projects and to the voluntary organisations
involved in Cool with Change. Thanks to the anonymous referees and to Berry Mayall for insightful
comments.
Sue Milne’s research was supported by an ESRC studentship (PTA-030-2004-00795) and the Cool with
Change project was supported by a lottery research grant funding now called the Big Lottery.

Notes
1. Poor working-class children were integrated into many aspects of family and household work being
regarded as at the service of adults, particularly their parents (e.g., Nasaw 1985, Jamieson 1987,
Davin 1996). In this sense, Magazine and Sanchez (2007) are over-simplifying when they speak of
the ‘European tradition’ of children’s dependence, since this presumes a long history of a form of
‘normal childhood’ that was not widespread till the second half of the twentieth century.
2. The term ‘to ken’ is Scots for ‘to know’, like the German verb kennen.
3. The early death of a parent also continues to be a major risk to a child’s personal and familial relation-
ships in much of the Majority World.
 Children’s Geographies 275

4. The Cool with Change project investigated the experiences and views of 10–14 year olds of family
change. Surveys were conducted in one city in school with pupils from diverse ethnic backgrounds
and varied socio-economic circumstances. This identified pupils who had experienced family change,
most commonly a father leaving the family household following the divorce or separation of parents.
In depth interviews explored young people’s experiences and views of family change. 361 pupils were
surveyed and in depth interviews conducted with 55 pupils. All names used in quotations are pseudonyms.
5. UK commentaries include Crow (2002), Smart and Shipman (2004), Brannen and Nilsen (2005),
Duncan and Smith (2006), Smart (2007) and Charles et al. (2008).

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