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Abstract

In this second report on children’s geographies, I ask what geographical research on children and childhood can tell us about adults and adulthood. Discussing three figurative relationalities – childhood as a projection, project and provenance of adulthood – the report addresses the asymmetrical dynamics between adults and children as they manifest distinctively in spatial contexts ranging from family and education to climate politics and war. This relational framing offers a critical lens for examining adulthood not as an implicitly normative model of subjectivity but in relation to its contingent positioning vis-à-vis childhood.

Keywords

children’s geographies adult-child relations child subjectivity politics of childhood adult geographies

I Introduction

Conceptualisations of childhood rarely unfold without invoking the figure of the adult. Adults are what children are not (Jones, 2013), what they will become (Worth, 2009), what they relate to (Mitchell and Elwood, 2012), what they mimic and exceed (Woodyer, 2012), reflect and engage with (Kallio and Häkli, 2011), navigate (Hörschelmann and Van Blerk, 2011) and resist (Jeffrey, 2012). Relationalities with adults are at the heart of children’s geographies, with a range of central concepts anchored in the relational dynamics between childhood and adulthood, including youth and adolescence (Smith and Mills, 2019), life-course (Smith and Kraftl, 2024) and generations (Almeida et al., 2023; Punch, 2020; Richardson, 2023; also Wilkinson et al., 2022).

This second report centres on adult-child relationalities, but it seeks to flip the script in which children are the ultimate focus of children’s geographies. Rather than examining what adult-child relationalities reveal about children, it asks what they may give away about adults. Geographers have long been attentive to the dynamics shaping interactions between adults and children, recognising these relations as central to spatial and social structures. Ontological analyses of childhood show how adult actions and presence mediate children’s agency and subjectivity (Holloway et al., 2019), while epistemological discussions have highlighted the ‘otherness’ of childhood to adults and the inherent challenges in bridging adult and child perspectives (Jones, 2013). These relationalities manifest in the spatialities of social life that are the subject of geographical inquiry, most notably family (Tarrant and Hall, 2020), and institutional domains like care (Disney, 2017), education (Hammond, 2022) and planning (Freeman and Tranter, 2011), as well as the non-institutional settings of (non-familiar) adult-child encounters, often framed through the lens of danger and risk (Berasategi Sancho et al., 2024; Djohari et al., 2018; Zhou et al., 2024). As Holloway (2014) rightly points out, ‘feminist research […] stimulated interest in parents, educators and other institutions which shape, and are shaped by, children’s lives’ (p. 378), and a focus on adults is not entirely absent from children’s geographies. However, rather than examining roles which position children as relational components of adult identities – such as in the research on experiences of parents, carers and educators – this report centres on work that addresses childhood and children’s lives and which in turn informs geographical understandings of adulthood.

The report is anchored in the premise that adult-child relations are inherently asymmetrical and steeped in power (Wall, 2022). In a discipline acutely attuned to intersectional inequities and binary hierarchies that sustain them (Hopkins, 2019), there is a surprisingly limited notion of adult geographies (Agha et al., 2019; Rollo, 2016; Skelton, 2009), the side of adult-child relationalities that serves as a model for humanity. Where feminist, queer, critical disability and anti-racist perspectives critically interrogate masculinity, heteronormativity, ableism and Whiteness, and their masquerading as ‘nonidentity […] the natural order of things’ (McRuer, 2006: 1), there is little sustained engagement with age as arguably the most pervasive normative societal model¹.

In the rest of this report, I explore three relationalities between adults and children through which conceptualisations of adulthood come into view through the prism of childhood. In the first, childhood emerges as a projection of adulthood, a site of ascription of values and identity features in the present, whereby adults leave imprints of their subjectivity in children. The second relationality shows childhood as an adult project, a future-oriented set of enterprises in which child subjects emerge as vehicles for societal reproduction. In the third section, I discuss childhood as an adult provenance, a figurative relation in which traces of childhood provoke a speculative understanding of adulthood.

II Childhood as projection

I draw on the notion of projection and its origins in psychology, as the process of ascribing aspects of oneself – feelings, actions or identity traits – onto another. Projection may serve as a ‘component of empathy’ and an attempt to ‘appraise the experiences of other people’ (Clark, 1998: 103), but also as a mechanism whereby challenging internal content (perceptions, values and identity features) is externalised onto others. Projection is an active, intersubjective process, a communicative form of interaction through which subjects are co-constituted (Bion, 1970). Conceptualising childhood as a collective adult projection thus entails ‘adults attributing themselves onto actual, real children and devising a politics of childhood that is ultimately about building an adult subject via childhood’ (Esson et al., 2024: 2). The act of projection onto childhood can manifest in a variety of adult-child dynamics, from trust and collaborations whereby adults endeavour to shape child subjects (Kullman, 2010), to more coercive and violent expressions (Disney, 2017).

An example of childhood as projection is research itself. The endeavour to develop ‘child-friendly’ or ‘child-centred’ methodologies (Roerig and Evers, 2019) has produced what Hackett et al. (2024) refer to as the ‘Good Research Child’. This term embodies a distinctively ‘child’ subjectivity, characterised by ‘not being an adult’, yet it carries the very qualities adult researchers expect and on which they build their notions of research conduct (e.g. ‘Good Research Children tell stories, plant trees, eat healthily, love reading and engage enthusiastically with researchers as co-playmates’). Imagined child research participants are not replicas of adults – owing to the emphasis on ‘child-centrism’ – but rather projections of adult visions of research, ‘legible, discernible and relatable’ (ibid.) to a sufficient degree. When they diverge from these projected models, such as by being hostile or disengaged (Blazek, 2021), this not only raises questions about their suitability as research subjects (though not as child subjects) but also signals to adult researchers a perceived research ‘failure’ (Horton, 2008). Children may have no familiarity with the notion of research (Truscott and Benton, 2024), yet as they are part of it, their participation imbues them with subjectivity as child research participants, that is, subjects projected from adult conceptions of research that enable adult researchers to pursue their work.

Another prominent domain of geographical work that reveals childhood as a form of adult projection is education. Education is a sphere where adult values and societal principles are projected onto children, such as around environmental ethics (King et al., 2024; Spiteri, 2024), safety and inclusivity (Bain and Podmore, 2021) and health and embodiment (Kannan, 2022a; Kitching et al., 2022; Toldo, 2022). These projections often reveal conflicts between values of families, individual educators and the state, whether within formal (Hammond, 2022), supplementary (Fairless Nicholson, 2023; Holloway and Pimlott-Wilson, 2024), informal (Pimlott-Wilson and Coates, 2019) or family-based educational contexts (Kraftl, 2013). Research in geographies of education further reveal the scopes and instruments of neoliberal (Landolt and Bauer, 2023) and other forms of adult governmentality (Schreiber et al., 2016) as they emanate from state ideologies and institutions and permeate everyday children’s worlds with values, imperatives and norms. Cope’s (2024) recent work on early twentieth century institutions for ‘destitute’ children terms the biopolitical mechanisms through which adults impose their ideal expectations on children as a process of ‘fixing’ them, in the sense of both ‘pinning [them] in place, and as repairing children perceived to be “broken”’. Other examples of such processes include the role of education and schooling in the reinforcement of racialisation (Hanna, 2023; Kumari, 2022) and other types of structural oppression such as in relation to class and gender (Kannan, 2022b). Conversely, geographers have also pointed to the educational effort of institutions such as youth work organisations to facilitate alternative liberatory spaces for children (De St Croix and Doherty, 2023; Sutherland et al., 2023).

Education may be an obvious space of institutional intervention in children’s lives projecting adult values, but it is not the only one. Adults shape child subjectivities by projecting their own identities in the context of family life, as illustrated by Caro (2019) in work on intergenerational visions of gender in rural Chile or Mukherjee (2021) in children’s navigating parental moral frameworks and practical restrictions of access to digital technologies. Beyond education and family, Butler (2022) and Edwards (2024) address classed and racialised moral projections of the asylum system and how they are negotiated by children from refugee backgrounds, both through encounters with formal institutions and through their imbuement in everyday community and peer interactions. Elsewhere, Tori et al. (2024) examine the inscription of adult values around safety and health into urban and transportation planning, while Avramović and Žegarac (2016), Stephens et al. (2017) and Krishnamurthy (2024) all critically engage with the values embedded in policies addressing public play spaces and other community services. This work underscores the challenges of disentangling ostensibly child-focused urban policies from structural impediments to inclusivity and equity that permeate urban life, such as colonial legacies and neo-colonialism, classism and ableism. Finally, a notable body of research addresses children’s interactions with political structures, critically interrogating the efforts to bolster children’s participation (Cuevas-Parra, 2023; Firinci Orman, 2022; Löw-Beer and Luh, 2024).

The figure of childhood frequently serves as a vessel for compassion, a projection of values about peace and humanity. This positions children as the unconditional recipients of sympathy in contexts of violence, suffering and exploitation. Hörschelmann (2015) reflects how depictions of harm inflicted upon children as always wrong present ‘a powerful way of contesting injustice’ yet they risk perpetuating problematic colonialist sentiments […where…] solidarity becomes conditional on ‘innocence’ (p. 275). Recent interventions of children’s geographers responding to the violence in Gaza (Children’s Geographies, 2024; Wells et al., 2024) foreground the disproportional burden of suffering borne by children and the violation of their rights, acknowledging children’s vulnerability while also calling for an end to violence that extends beyond its impact on children alone. In a different context, Miller and Beazley (2022) investigate how the idealised image projections of childhood are instrumentalised in orphanage tourism to align with adult expectations, while Garlen and Hembruff (2023) examine depictions of children engaged in Black Lives Matter protests as defying the constructed notion of children’s innocence as a defining characteristic of child subjectivity. Elsewhere, geographical scholarship on child labour (Blagbrough, 2023; Klocker, 2014; Komsoon et al., 2023; Olayiwola, 2021; Yeboah and Boafo, 2024) challenges predominantly Western projections of children as to be disregarded from work due to their vulnerability and the primacy of schooling, while detailing the formative processes facilitated by work experiences – both beneficial and harmful – and underscoring the need for supporting structures within local contexts that may diverge markedly from Western conceptions of childhood.

III Childhood as project

The second form of adult-child relationality I explore in this report is about childhood as an adult-driven project: ‘a goal- and future-oriented society-building enterprise in which adults seek to reproduce themselves’ (Esson et al., 2024: 2). Where childhood as projection focuses on interactions here and now, shaping current child subjects through the lens of adult values and as reflections of adult identities, childhood as project is future-focused, concerned with children’s eventual transition into adulthood and the societal ideas adults wish to cultivate. In a similar language, Gilliam and Gulløv (2022) refer to children as ‘potential’, as ‘mouldable, impressionable, sensitive, breakable and yet also potentially resistant and troublesome future-adults – as small seeds of the future, as society-in-the-making’ (p. 312), highlighting ‘the efforts, hopes and fears that adult society invest in children and through them in future society’ (p. 311).

As De Leeuw (2009: 123) notes in the context of Canada’s geographies, ‘children and concepts of childhood were focal points of colonialism’, a legacy that persists through mechanisms such as the ongoing separation of Indigenous children from their families and communities and stripping them of their identities via state-imposed legal structures (De Leeuw, 2016). Similarly, Von Benzon (2022) refers to British children as ‘colonial commodities’, critiquing the state-sanctioned resettlement of underprivileged British children to New Zealand as a tool of colonial expansion. In a picture that similarly links geopolitics and embodied governmentality of childhood, children are also at the heart of nation-building politics, manifest in practices of everyday nationalism within schools and families (Benwell, 2014; Reimers and Puskas, 2023) and intersecting with religion and other axes of political identity (Amatullah 2022). In all these instances, the biopolitics of childhood is oriented towards constructing economic and cultural futures where today’s children will be adult societal subjects.

Other geographers have examined the place of children in the futuristic politics of urban development. Cele (2015) thus critiques neoliberal urban projects in Sweden that incorporate childhood into imaginaries of economic growth and global competitiveness rather than as a domain performed by children themselves. Conversely, Bizotto et al. (2024) discuss children’s roles in housing struggles in Brazil. Through their mobility, creativity and play, children’s potential as agents of contestation for the right to the city and broader urban transformation comes to the forefront, with a hope for more equitable futures. Positioned between ‘the state, capital and families’ (Shen and Lu, 2023), children serve as both subjects and objects of urban politics, positioned as vehicles of change through which adults pursue contested visions of future cities.

Whereas the previous section focused on geographies of education in relation to the construction of childhood as an adult projection – where education functions as a vehicle for reproducing adult values and politics in the shaping of child subjectivities – there is another, related yet distinct angle within the geographies of education. Here, children are not merely targets of edification but seen also as problem-solving agents with unique capabilities and thus crucial for future-building efforts. Notable recent examples from majority and minority world contexts include research on environmental education that foregrounds children’s ‘distinctive environmental knowledge’ (Smith, 2013: 10), which calls in turn for recognising education as a reciprocal learning process (also Carr et al., 2020; Khatun and Logan, 2024; Walker, 2021), and children’s learning as key to urgent resilience planning and execution when it comes to environmental crises (Bell et al., 2024; Trott, 2024). Elsewhere, Dickens (2017) theorises the educational practices of youth work as processes of ‘world building’, in which education is not merely an individual experience but positions young people as ‘always-already a source for emergent knowledges and autonomous futures’ (p. 1301). Youth work thus transcends the role of a targeted welfare intervention that contemporary neoliberal models ascribed to it, and it emerges instead as a world-making project that draws on both established and nascent forms of young people’s agency.

Children are deemed fundamental to future-building also at a more intimate and informal level of family. Geographical work on aspirations discusses young people as being ‘tasked’ (Pimlott-Wilson, 2017) towards the future in ways that do not affect just them but are impactful on their families too. Family practices contributing into such future-oriented projects take place at a variety of scales and spatialities: from enhancement of children’s socio-economic positions through family transnational migration (Ho, 2017; Katigbak-Montoya, 2024; Tu, 2019), to mundane everyday activities such the time spent by adults in family learning (Wainwright and Marandet, 2011) or involvement in intra- (Samson, 2018) and inter-cultural (Wilson, 2014) encounters. Another articulation of childhood as a project comes from research on geographies of care. Care serves as a carrier of social reproduction, and children are both recipients of care from their family members and other institutions and act as carers themselves, caring for relatives, friends and their worlds more widely (Bartos, 2012; Blazek et al., 2015; Evans, 2010). Holt and Philo’s recent (Holt, 2017; Holt and Philo, 2023) work extends this argument by pointing to the interconnectedness of agency between children and carers in all periods of childhood, beginning from infancy as a point where key formative interventions towards children’s future subjectivities take place.

IV Childhood as provenance

In this section, I refer to childhood figuratively as the provenance of adulthood, its beginning or origin, not necessarily in a chronological or biological sense, but as an epistemological source. Childhood here becomes an object of inquiry that leaves traces, allowing us to discover the contours of adult geographies. This body of work encompasses diverse perspectives that examine childhood experiences, contexts and artefacts as a means of speculating on the formation of adulthood. I focus here on five types of such relationalities.

First, a number of geographers adopt a ‘non-child-centric’ (Philo, 2016) approach, utilising children’s geographies as a lens through which broader human geography can be explored: ‘instead of looking in at children’s lifeworlds as the chief focus of concern’, it ‘looks out from these lifeworlds to see what they illuminate – what they inform/tell us about – the wider matrices of societal/global change in which they are unavoidably embedded’ (p. 624). Kraftl’s (2020) method of moving children ‘in and out of focus’ in the analysis of domains such as media and materiality and Burman’s (2022) concept of ‘found childhood’ centred on ‘discarded/found childhood-related artefacts encountered in public space’ (p. 271) exemplify the potential to recognise childhood as both a key element of the broader world and a window into comprehending adult spaces through direct, indirect and fluctuating positioning of childhood as the subject of attention.

Second, a bourgeoning field of children’s geographies addresses materiality and relationality of childhood whereby human subjectivity emerges from children’s assemblages and encounters with environments, whether material (Tembo, 2024) or digital (Pettersen, 2024). This research often foregrounds ‘mundane’ moments of childhood, largely untouched by adult projections. An important contribution to these debates comes from indigenous perspectives on children’s multispecies relations (Nelson and Drew, 2024; Rousell, 2024), challenging adult-centric worldviews and offering insights into broader processes such as colonisation, climate change and urban politics.

Third, recent work in cultural geography has mobilised creative and artistic portrayals of childhood in media such as film and graphic novels to theorise societal phenomena including war, poverty (Jones, 2013), landscape (Yan, 2020), gentrification (Seitz, 2022) and nostalgia (Ahmed, 2022). These depictions engage neither with children’s perspectives nor the actual structures shaping their lives but rather draw on the speculative roles of children in creative accounts of adult-child relationalities. As Seitz (2022) argues, ‘fictitious children can tell us things that documentaries and interview-based work cannot, because ‘objective’ claims about children are themselves a kind of fiction, deeply structured by an always motivated idea of the ‘real’ child, which can interfere with children’s more wide-ranging and more threatening forms of agency’ (p. 88). While certainly limited in its speculative character, work with fictional children and childhood generates connections with adult geographies in ways that can sidestep epistemological limits and ethical barriers presented in research with ‘real’ children.

Fourth, childhood itself can be a category and catalyst for political discourses, as seen in the context of in vitro fertilisation (IVF) and related moral and religious debates in Poland (Maciejewska-Mroczek and Radkowska-Walkowicz, 2019). Maciejewska-Mroczek and Radkowska-Walkowicz here argue that the IVF child ‘exists in the public debate, in the words of journalists, politicians, priests, theologians, sometimes doctors and, less often, parents but not as a ‘person’ or ‘the child’ but rather as ‘an argument’ (p. 45). The figure of an IVF child functions as an ideological symbol within debates dominated by the Catholic Church, and childhood reflects broader discourses on life, morals, technology and social recognition.

And finally, there is a substantive body of work reflecting on adult narratives of their own childhood experiences. Harris and Valentine (2017), for instance, provide insights into the development of attitudes towards difference in multicultural societies, while Gaini and Sleire (2023) explore childhood memories in smaller rural communities, highlighting the interplays between the past and present enveloped within ties to specific places. Elsewhere, the work of Marrun and Rodriguez-Campo (2023) investigates how memories of structural violence at the intersection of racial capitalism and patriarchy faced by Latinx children provide lenses into understanding adult strategies of defiance and solidarity. As Mavroudi and Holt (2021) highlight in their work on childhood memories and nation-building practices, memories of childhood should not be seen as accurate representations of the past but rather as creative and affective outcomes of individual and collective memory-work that reflect adult geographies.

V Conclusions

This report examined three relationalities through which children’s geographies may contribute to reframing the understanding of adulthood. In the first, childhood is a projection of adulthood, where adult values and identities are passed onto children in domains such as research, education, policy-making and political campaigning. In the second, childhood can be viewed as a future-oriented adult project of social reproduction, unfolding within politics of colonialism, nationalism and the city, as well as within family care and education. In the third, childhood appears as the provenance of adulthood, where traces and artefacts of childhood, such as memories, fictional portrayals, legal and moral conceptualisations and mundane encounters, offer a basis for speculating on adult geographies.

By shifting the geographical focus towards adulthood, I do not mean to diminish the importance of attending to children’s lives and livelihoods or suggest retreating from the commitment to more equitable research with children at all stages of knowledge production and dissemination (van Blerk, forthcoming). Instead, the focus is on problematising the tacit adult assumptions embedded in children’s geographies that do not account for the ways in which childhood is shaped, produced and governed through an inherently adult-centric lens, whether in research, family, education or policy-making. Recognising the epistemic violence towards children, compounded by the status of those multiply marginalised by their position on the periphery of global systems of governance and knowledge production (Blazek, 2024; Kocsis, 2024), this report positions its insights as a means to interrogate adulthood (or adulthoods) as a normative model. Pointing to fundamentally different manifestation of the conceptions of age across different socio-spatial contexts, Kraftl (in Esson et al., 2024) asks whether ‘anyone [is] ever adult?’ Rather than suggesting a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ for an answer, this should become a prompt for children’s geographers to question what it means to be an adult, and what may be at stake when the focus of children’s geographies deflects from children towards the rest of us.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Matej Blazek

Note

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Children’s geographies II: Adults

Abstract

Keywords

I Introduction

II Childhood as projection

III Childhood as project

IV Childhood as provenance

V Conclusions

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

Funding

ORCID iD

Note

References