Listening to children

This chapter explores a drive to listen to children and will explore how a participatory approach to children’s services can support children’s health and well-being. It explores approaches which have sought to better listen and evaluates the practicalities of such an approach. Children routinely worked through the industrial revolution and even had their right to work enshrined in the Geneva Declaration on the Rights of the Child. T. Waller explored children’s gender identity in outdoor play spaces and discovered that free flow play in the outdoor environment has the capacity to perpetuate gender difference. Listening to children, and valuing their voice, promotes agency and democratic values within our settings and so supports well-being and development. The rights of children are enshrined in law after coming to the attention of the world largely during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.