ABSTRACT
At the global level there has been an increasing discontent with how children have been named, reified, and measured. Prevailing Eurocentric and North-American notions of “childhood” and “development” hold sway in how “childhood” is constructed and how “development” is theorized. Benchmarks about progression are viewed as universal, and little has been done to disrupt the colonization of families who have children who do not fit the Eurocentric milestones and who are asked to change their family practices in order to be “ready for learning.” In this book, we explicitly provide a series of windows on the construction of childhood around the world, as a means for conceptualizing and more sharply defining the emerging field of “global-local childhood studies.” Providing research evidence of the nature and range of childhood contexts across countries provides a conceptual platform in which to draw comparisons and to build new understandings of the concept of childhood.
