ABSTRACT
In development programmes targeting children, ideas about childhood are intricately linked to ideas about development, such that it is often difficult to articulate where ideas derived from child development end, and those associated with community or international development begin. Charting this complex terrain, in which international bodies, national agencies, and local organisations intervene to “save,” “restore,” or “enable” certain kinds of childhood, this chapter seeks to foreground children’s own experience of their life stage, birthdays, age, and growing up. Building on children’s more abstract reflections about childhood and age that emerged in interviews, the last part of this chapter explores the concrete way ideas about childhood were contested and negotiated in the course of an NGO campaign to prevent child marriage.
