ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of the book. The book is based on understandings derived from conversations that had over a period of one year with a group of 10- and 11-year-old children. It focuses on the social location of children and the contextual framework of their accounts. The book presents a discussion with the children about friendship to demonstrate the centrality and power of childhood culture as it applies to the children's interactions with one another. It analyses the strategies the children use for making sense of and coping with the adult world. The children's world is presented as one with its own pragmatic philosophy. The knowledge children bring to adult-child interactions is different from that brought to their shared culture, and it is different again from the knowledge adults bring to adult-child interactions.
