ABSTRACT
The label of pragmatist is often used to refer, in a less than flattering light, to someone who ignores principles in favour of any means which allow them to achieve their goals. In this book, pragmatism is explored as a theoretical framework, which informs our understanding of children's nursing. A pragmatic approach offers children's nurses a way to account for the phenomena of children's nursing and to understand how children's nursing helps children to live a childhood where they also live with illness and or life-limiting/threatening disease at a particular time in their communities. Nursing children is about education in its broadest sense, preparing the next generation to take its place in its society's structure. The North American pragmatism of scholars such as William James, Charles Peirce, John Dewey, Donaldson and Richard Rorty offers a way to approach children's nursing which allows children's nurses to understand the time and spaces that children and their carers find themselves in.
