Listening to children and young people in Sweden: Practices,possibilities,and tensions

Abstract

This piece is a collective exploration by seven doctoral researchers in Child Studies, who discuss notions of listening to children and young people in a Swedish context. We approach different aspects of listening in research and in practices such as education, psychiatry, and social work. The discussions in this collective writing are an invitation for continuous reflections about the contexts where listening to children is done, its challenges and possibilities.

Keywords

child studies collective writing listening to children

Introduction

Child and childhood scholars have engaged in listening to children as a key component of studying children’s lives. This is connected to an emphasis on children’s experiences and perspectives and the recognition of children as social actors (James, 2007). Listening to children has been employed for obtaining insight into children’s thoughts, feelings, and opinions on various aspects of their lives, which has provided important knowledge about children’s lived experiences. In these efforts, however, while listening to children is entangled with well-theorized concepts such as “children’s voices” and “children’s perspectives,” listening remains conceptually overlooked.

Listening to children has also been advocated as an effort toward emphasizing children’s participation in society. The voices of children have become a symbol of the commitment to the values of democracy and care, especially in the modern welfare state (James, 2007: 261), and appeals for adults to “listen to the children” are commonly used as political arguments for change. In Sweden, listening to children is a powerful rhetorical argument in public discourse and a focus concern in the work of institutions responsible for legislation and policy work. Children’s right to express their views is also stated in the UN Convention of the Rights of the Child, which was incorporated into Swedish law in 2020. However, when the weight to be given to children’s expressed views is considered, the widespread idea that the adult world should listen to children becomes less uniform. Contrasting theoretical perspectives on what listening is and what a child is result in different ethical implications about how a good listening to children is accomplished (Andrén and Zetterqvist Nelson, 2022a), in society as well as in research.

In this collective paper, we are seven doctoral researchers in Child Studies at Linköping University who engage with the question “what does listening to children entail?” This requires asking ourselves how we understand listening and how listening to children is done. We draw on discussions on listening that approach speaking and listening as interlinked and interactive, following Lisbeth Lipari’s (2014) provoking reflections toward breaking with established beliefs that listening is subordinate to speech. The listener is thus considered as something more than a receiver and listening is a way to relate to the other’s otherness. This means that listening cannot fully overcome misunderstandings and fissures, and points to listening beyond speech, toward an embodied language as well as to the silences and voids (see also Spyrou, 2016; and Orrmalm, Annerbäck and Sparrman, 2022). Regarding listening to children when done by adults, we draw from Clark’s (2017) definition of listening as an active process, where encounters with children in research situations are processes for “co-creating meanings,” in opposition to “extracting truths.” However, we also problematize the idea that listening to children is essentially good. By approaching listening to children in different contexts, we throw light on who is listening, which children are listened to and how, touching upon the complexities of these processes.

This collective writing results from posing such questions in relation to our diverse research projects, our understanding of welfare institutions for children, and our lived experiences. We have identified different conditions, possibilities, tensions, and interpretations of what listening to children means, addressing both theoretical and methodological aspects of listening. The format has encouraged us to work collectively, while providing each author a distinct space in the form of individual short texts (cf. Tesar et al., 2021). In this process, we authors are connected directly and indirectly to each other. Connections exist due to the proximity and collegiality of sharing a physical space in the division of Child Studies, and the exchanges encouraged by the field’s interdisciplinarity.

Collectively we chose the topic and collaboratively we wrote the introduction and conclusion, as well as reviewed each other’s individual contributions. The short texts can be read independently, but in our attempt to respond to a common problem formulation, the thread tying them together consists of the tensions identified in how listening to children is understood and done in different Swedish contexts. By exploring local examples, we want to contribute to the debates about how listening to children carries different meanings and implications in child research, depending on how, and in which context, listening is done.

Doing listening to children in a Swedish preschool

Olga Anatoli

The phrase “listening to children” has become an ideological imperative in socio-political discourse, emphasizing the value of the children’s voice while potentially objectifying children as the subordinate “other.” Trained in applied linguistics and linguistic anthropology, when confronting the issue of listening to children, I turn away from abstract theorizing toward looking intently at mundane encounters that involve children and adults. By closely observing life unfolding in everyday interactions, it is possible to understand regular practices, norms and values that guide their participants, which is particularly relevant for children who may have methods for ensuring recipiency—that is, being listened to and heard—that are different from those of adults.

Sweden as a welfare state where children’s rights are guaranteed by law provides an important context for understanding the meaning of listening to children. Recalling the adage “It takes a village to raise a child,” in Sweden, the state becomes the village that allow parents to offload child-rearing responsibilities onto institutions of childhood education and care. Listening to children, thus, becomes a professional skill. While research on adult-child interaction has largely focused on familial contexts, with mother as the default adult recipient of children’s talk, the context of Swedish near-universal preschools allows us to gain an understanding of how adults and very young children share lived experiences and how listening to children is accomplished.

Ethnography, including participant observation, has proved to be an important and productive method for understanding how children communicate with adults and other children, including children with physical and cognitive impairments (Komulainen, 2007). The ethnomethodological approach allows the researcher to bring to the forefront the ways in which listening to children happens and what consequences it has, beyond what the observed may report in interviews. Recent studies based on ethnographic fieldwork in Swedish preschools argue that children’s socialization into institutional norms is dialogic, that adults’ listening to children occurs in the sequence of unfolding actions that the children are active participants of, including the mutual construction of haptic sociality (e.g. Andrén and Cekaite, 2017; Cekaite and Holm Kvist, 2017). Notably, listening to children is realized not only through systematic strategies for the state regulation of children’s lives, but also through public research facilities allocating resources for studying children’s perspective and informing the practice. Empirical research on adult-child interaction has, for example, been particularly relevant in light of the current challenges facing Sweden—and other multiethnic states—in listening to children in their own (various) languages (Björk-Willén, 2022).

Orchestrating listening

Emilia Holmbom Strid

Listening is an important pedagogical practice, particularly in Swedish preschools. The educare model used in these preschools includes caring for both children’s wellbeing and educational features of groups (The Swedish National Agency for Education, 2019). The preschool environment is a complex setting where large groups can often mean children competing for the floor and teachers ensuring that everyone has the chance to talk. Participating appropriately in group situations, particularly those with young children, takes practice and involves both displays of attentive listening and being able to display appropriate verbal and embodied responses (Corsaro, 2018). Listening is dialogical and responsive in its design and includes many rules and norms. Examining how attention is organized can deepen our understanding of both what children’s listening entails and what it means to listen to children within the common group context.

Initiating and maintaining children’s attention in groups and at the same time having an educational goal requires hard work. Interactional studies have shown a variety of ways that teacher’s use to initiate and maintain children’s attention: such as asking questions, building on children’s contributions to the topic or by presenting something as interesting (Bateman, 2020; Cekaite and Björk-Willén, 2018). The use of gestures, particularly hand gestures, is a way of orchestrating listening. The educational situation can be compared to an orchestra where the teacher is the conductor using their baton to set the pace and rhythm of the child ensemble. In doing so the teacher serves as a guide that scaffolds the children in the interactional structure and expectations of the activity, signaling when, how, and what intensity of response is expected. Affective features (such as prosody and emotion expressions) have shown to be particularly important when scaffolding children’s participation and attentive listening (Cekaite and Björk-Willén, 2018). By displaying affective features, the teacher helps the children align with the previous turn and enable a moment of shared display for all children to join.

As the teacher regulates the displays and utterances made by the children, they can put the children’s contributions and emotional expression on hold, showing that there is an appropriate time and way of contributing (Strid, forthcoming). Taking a step away from the planned structure of the activity can create an opportunity for spontaneous learning. How much the child can deviate from the expected structure is related to how much the child’s deviations/contribution disturbs the other participants and the educational activity, and disruptions are often the basis for corrections by the teacher.

To conclude, listening in an educational setting is thus part of a teaching moment but also a part of doing community. Listening and orchestrating listening in preschool activities is a highly embodied practice that is not necessarily still or particularly quiet. By looking at the interaction, it is possible to discern how complex organized doing listening is. By highlighting children’s own listening practices, studying the interaction in the educational setting as a whole makes it possible to visualize the challenges children face in their everyday lives.

The complexity in listening in child protection cases

Veronica Hällqvist

Within child protective services in Sweden, children do not only have a statutory right to be heard ( Socialtjänstlag, 2001: 453), obtaining a child’s story and perspective is an essential part of being able to protect a child from abuse and neglect (Socialdepartementet, 2011: 61). This makes the dialog between the child and the social worker crucial in child protection cases. However, the perception of listening can differ between the child and the social worker involved in the dialog. For instance, McLeod (2008) found that social workers perceived listening as “paying attention to what they [the child] said, having an open attitude, respecting and empathizing with their feelings, but not necessarily doing as they asked. For the young people on the other hand, if no action followed, the adults had not really been listening.” (p. 21). These different views on what the concept of listening can infer in the context of child protection services, should be given more attention.

The complexity of child protective cases is well known, as the social worker will be expected not only to consider the child’s wishes, but also has an obligation to act in line with legislation and professional expertise to determine what is in the child’s best interest. Listening in the context of child protection is only one aspect, but could potentially, besides not fulfilling the child’s right to be listened to, have a direct effect on the overall aim of protecting the child. Especially as children who do not feel listened to might eventually stop sharing (Ericsson, 2015). To obtain vital information within child protective services, it is necessary that children who have the ability to share actually want to do so. In the end, no matter how tailored the situation is to enhance the child’s participation, a child still must choose to participate (McLeod, 2008).

The above highlights the importance of children feeling listened to in child protection cases, and if we look at listening as something as simple as a child either being listened to or not, this may leave out the complexity of the situation in dialogs between children and social workers. With this in consideration, can we look at listening in the context of child protection in the same way as in other contexts? Andrén and Zetterqvist Nelson (2022a) highlight the implications of assessing listening within child protection as solely “good [or bad] listening” being done by the social worker, illuminating two aspects: (1) this can reduce the social workers’ scope for action, since they, for different reasons, will not always be able to act according to the child’s wishes, (2) this puts the responsibility for the result of the dialog on the child.

So how should we look at listening within the context of child protective services and how can we further think about listening to children with the goal of children feeling listened to and being willing and able to share?

A fetishistic disavowal of listening

Joacim Strand

So far, the 21st century has, in a Swedish context, consisted of a long series of news about children’s mental illness. But what role does the discourse of children’s rights to be heard play in both a clinical and public understanding of children’s mental illness? Are there normative claims to listening to children which conceal another form of listening?

In my research on how children’s self-injurious behavior is constructed at the intersection between psychiatric and the public discourse, I find that listening to children is used as an argument to contest previous perspectives on self-harm. In the past, self-harming subjects have often been dismissed and neglected as manipulative malingerers. Instead, in recent decades, self-harm has been constructed as an internal emotion regulation (Chaney, 2017). In this way, self-injurious behavior is presented as testimonies of children’s mental illness.

The definition of self-injurious behavior oscillates between constructing the self-harming subject as vulnerable to affects and being self-conscious and having self-control. This means that the self-harming child is assumed to be, or be able to become, aware of the motives for their self-injurious behavior. The self-harming child is thus shaped after a late-modern self that has control over its emotional life (Foucault, 1988; Steggals, 2015). But this also leads to an authorization of children’s emotions and experiences as self-conscious beings. Hereby, listening to children emerges as a central argument for understanding children’s mental illness; it is the children themselves who know why they injure themselves.

The above raises ethical questions about listening to children. What kind of listening is made possible when it is assumed that the child is self-reliant and self-aware? This is not only an issue concerning children with self-injurious behavior but it also highlights different logics in psychiatry. On the one hand, there is the policy that both child and adult patients are seen as experts on their experiences of illness and should be involved in their care (Winther Jørgensen, 2015). In line with this, communication between child and professional is described as dialog between competent actors, but as a dialog where the other’s listening does not challenge the interlocutor’s knowledge and experiences. On the other hand, care is standardized and evidence-based, which limits the professional’s subjective interventions in and distortions of the children’s narratives (Winther Jørgensen, 2015). But regardless of the logic that governs listening in psychiatry, it is my understanding that listening is aimed at confirming the children’s feelings, experiences, and identities instead of interpreting and interacting with what is listened to, which could disclose something unfamiliar and strange. In this way, the trope “listening to children” that pervades both the psychiatric and public discourse can be seen as a fetishistic disavowal. This means that the normative claims to listen to vulnerable and self-aware children become affectively invested in while performative listening is denied (Butler, 1997).

The point is not that performative listening can reveal the real child. From a critical perspective, however, the basic view of the solitary and conscious actor needs to be questioned; neither the speaker nor the listener can fully understand themselves or the other, which opens the possibility that the identity of both the speaker and the listener as well as the meaning of what has been enunciated can be altered by the performative act of listening.

The dilemma of governance when listening to children’s initiatives

Myung Hwa Baldini

In the landscape of Swedish institutions, my focus is on the School-age Educare Center (SAEC), a setting where listening to children is given particular importance. School-age educare is a voluntary form of schooling available in the hours before and after compulsory school, as well as during school holidays. As stated in the National Curriculum (Skolverket, 2022), activities in the SAEC shall depart from the student’s needs, interests, and initiatives, which are central to the institution’s aim of providing learning, care, and leisure for children. The space for children to “have a say” is considered especially important, and creating arenas for children’s input to be heard has been a strategy to fulfill the curriculum’s ambition to stimulate student participation (Skolverket, 2022). At the same time, recent policy changes have set demands for a more learning-oriented SAEC, resulting in increased adult control, and posing a conflict with the SAEC’s tradition of valuing children-initiated activities (Gustafsson Nyckel, 2020).

The Swedish SAEC is therefore a place where the tensions between children’s voices and children’s influence become evident. Critiques raised by scholars in child and childhood studies about the potential that initiatives for children’s participation have in fostering children’s self-governance (Horgan et al., 2017) are especially relevant in this context. Studies on the opportunities for and constraints to participation in school-age educare by Elvstrand and Lago (2019) and Elvstrand and Närvänen (2016) provide examples on how ways for participation risk functioning as a form of regulation of children’s behaviors. Strategies aimed at creating space for children’s input such as the council—a common practice in Swedish SAEC—are shown to not necessarily result in increased influence (Elvstrand and Lago, 2019). If children’s initiatives do not fit within the frame of validity determined by teachers, they are not even taken into consideration.

Arenas for children’s initiatives are not reduced to the formal moments arranged by adults, but also encompass children’s actions in everyday, informal situations (Horgan et al., 2017). The study of children’s initiatives and how they are listened to by adults in everyday situations in the SAEC throws light on the various ways children meaningfully influence the matters affecting them—including the ways children themselves identify as important. Nonetheless, in the study on processes of doing participation in the SAEC by Elvstrand and Lago (2019), participation both in formal and informal situations is found to be dependent on the ability to argue demonstrated by the child and on the good relations between the individual child and the teacher. Children are aware of how those who show adherence to the norms and expectations of adults are most likely to be rewarded with having their requests and suggestions taken into consideration. The adult holds the position of a gatekeeper, and the display of adult-approved behavior is many times the key to opening possibilities for children’s initiatives to be listened to.

Processes of listening to children and child participation in the SAEC provide interesting reflections about the relation between the value of the notion that children should be listened to and the ideas that shape how children’s initiatives are acted upon. These discussions are especially important due to the meeting between the pedagogical-orientated values and the voluntariness of leisure in the activities children do in the SAEC. The examples briefly discussed here point to the continuous need to examine how listening is distributed, the conditions under which children are encouraged to give input and the forms of influence these norms produce.

Listening to children as following children’s actions and activities

Rebecka Tiefenbacher

In this text, I want to discuss the notion of “listening to children” from a methodological perspective, focusing on research participation by children with disabilities. Thus, I understand listening to children as a question of how to “do” research so that the voices and experiences of children with disabilities can be heard.

Although the notion of children’s voices has been a central concern for child studies (see, for example, Orrmalm et al. 2022; Spyrou 2011), the voices of children with disabilities have been conspicuously absent from research. Reasons for this include assumptions about the ability of children with disabilities to participate in research as well as the perception that other people can better represent the points of view of children with disabilities (Underwood et al., 2015: 220–221). Furthermore, understanding “listening to children” as hearing children’s voices, where “voice” typically alludes to “a relatively straightforward mental, verbal and rational property of the individual” (Komulainen, 2007: 13), produces certain norms and standards about participation that exclude children who fall outside the norm of a “verbally expressive child” (Orrmalm et al., 2022: 71). So how can we listen to children whose voices cannot—or will not—be expressed in these ways?

In my research, this is a fundamental concern as I have sought to “listen” to the experiences of children (3–11 years) with disabilities such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The children I have met communicate in many different ways including verbalized words and sentences, body language as well as other vocalizations and gestures. In other words, these children’s ways of expressing themselves do not always fit within conventional understandings of “voice” and “listening.” I have found that even when adapting conventional research methods to facilitate “voiced” participation through the children’s different communicatory and interactional preferences, I could not capture the children’s points of view (Tiefenbacher, 2023). The problem was that with such methods—in this case, walk-and-talk conversations—the listening was happening through researcher-initiated activities, which assumed that children could—and would—express themselves in the ways that the researcher offered. This was problematic as children demonstrated that they did not want to participate on these terms (Tiefenbacher, 2023). I thus learned that I had to recognize how and when children “wanted” to be listened to before designing new methods or spaces in which children could express themselves.

So how did I listen to the children instead? I recognized that another way of listening was to follow the children’s actions and activities and to regard these as expressions of their points of view and experiences. Doing so departs from the children’s capabilities and preferences, as they determine the forms for participation, instead of assuming that the children will express themselves in one way or another (Tiefenbacher, 2023: 12). Thus, listening to children by following their actions and activities is one way in which we can listen to all children, regardless of their communicative and interactive skills. This has implications not only for children with disabilities but for all children who cannot or will not express themselves in ways assumed by conventional understandings of “voice” and “listening.”

Toward a pedagogy of listening to silence

Effrosyni (Froso) Terzoglou

We often associate children with life and life with senses; you know that a school is around the corner without seeing it yet, by hearing the crowd of children talking loudly or playing. While this dominant, normative understanding of hearing the child indicates for the adult in the room that everything is going as it should, silence among school children is often perceived and promoted as problematic. Unless it suits the occasion, silence results in something pathological, traumatic or a sign of shyness, that needs to be overcome. Having said that, it is important to not confuse listening to children with hearing them.

Hearing is a physiological, sensory function that mainly takes place in the human ear and requires a form of sound as a stimulant, while listening is part of a communication process, with sound occupying only a part of it. From a phenomenological perspective, Merleau-Ponty reflects on how silence “envelops speech,” as we read in Bindeman (2017: 151). According to Dauenhauer (1973: 9–10), silence should not be identified simply as the opposite of sound, as it has multiple functions. There is, therefore, something apart from and beyond the listening process than just hearing a child’s voice, but how can we embrace it in institutional settings such as schools instead of treating it as a problem?

If we look at Sweden, children are perceived as “autonomous individuals with rights” (Sandin and Halldén, 2003; Ericsson, 2009 in Andrén and Zetterqvist Nelson, 2022b: 2, my translation), in line with democratic values. Hence, as part of a contemporary educational setting, children as students are expected to be active, raise their voices and be at the center of the learning process. At the same time, school children stay in silence that is usually negatively charged, for example, when teachers are hushing them, or when they are not given the space and time to speak, despite their will to do so. Nevertheless, what occurs also in the classroom but has not been addressed enough is silence as a choice, when children do not want to participate orally in discussions, but they are still there, in person, finding other ways to indicate their presence.

Currently, there is an effort to embrace silence in the classroom, first and foremost by the Swedish National Agency of Education and by researchers. In her article, Blennow (2020) urges teachers to give more space to and refrain from oral communication, instead of filling the silence gap with their perceptions and words. Silence is therefore a form of expression and can be part of a dialogical relationship with others. It could function not only as a pedagogical act (see Fidyk, 2013), but even more as a reinforcement of inclusivity and a re-conceptualization of childhood; toward a new way of teaching and learning, finding creative ways to sit with silence is a step further to understanding children and their abilities better. Even when they say nothing, children are there and instead of misinterpreting their silence or ignoring it, we can rather offer it and its full potential a space.

Conclusion

With these texts, we discuss listening to children in different contexts, the importance of which applies to research as well as practice. Approaching listening as intersubjective and interactive means addressing how adults are doing something when listening to children. We have explored the topic through, first, conceiving listening as a professional skill in the ongoing interactions with children in preschool (Anatoli); second, exploring teachers’ orchestrating of children’s own listening as embodied practices in teaching and doing community (Holmbom Strid); third, discussing the need for and dilemmas in listening to children in child protection cases (Hällqvist); fourth, examining the construction of listening and subjectivity in public discourse of children’s mental illness (Strand); fifth, exploring how listening might be distributed according to adults’ expectations of children’s behaviors (Baldini); sixth, sharing methodological reflections on listening to children with disabilities (Tiefenbacher); and finally, staying with children’s silence as a way toward a new pedagogy (Terzoglou).

What has been discussed throughout this collective writing thus sets the ground for further reflections and raises questions, not solely about the ways listening to children are understood and done today, but also what listening can be, how much voice children have in public and private spaces and which children are being listened to. More specifically, by bringing up examples from interactions between adults and children in the Swedish context, we highlight the different power dynamics and the current attempts to introduce new ways of doing listening, in everyday situations and research. We furthermore argue that the hegemony of participation-as-voice needs to be problematized (Gallagher and Gallacher, 2008; James, 2007; Spyrou, 2016; Twum-Danso Imoh and Okyere, 2020) and therefore emphasize that we should not only acknowledge children’s voices but also their non-verbal expressions, actions, and refusals.

Our purpose with this text is to explore the meanings of listening to children not in isolation, but in relation to current debates. In this effort to emphasize the connections made possible by collaboration and collective discussion of a theme, with our text we invite other (doctoral students and) researchers to think and to further reflect on the different meanings and ways of listening to children in both research and society, locally and globally.

Exploring the complexities of children’s voices beyond just listening: A collective Journey (Open peer review)

Marek Tesar, The University of Auckland

The piece “Listening to Children and Young People in Sweden: Practices, Possibilities, and Tensions” presents a collective exploration by seven doctoral researchers in Child Studies (Tema Barn) at Linköping University that delves into the complex issue of listening to children in a Swedish context. The authors examine various dimensions of listening, its significance, and its application in research and various practical settings, such as education, psychiatry, and child protection. They also emphasize the multifaceted nature of listening to children, its theoretical underpinnings, and the ethical implications involved. Their work in this collective piece conceptualizes and interrogates the differences in how adults perceive listening to children and how children experience being listened to. It is a fascinating collective piece that recognizes both the comprehensive and thought-provoking nature of the subject matter. The authors’ thoughts and ideas blend well as they explore important concepts related to childhoods and child studies. Their emphasis on the interactivity of listening, the significance of silence, and the variations in power dynamics when it comes to listening to children are crucial aspects of contemporary child research.

The collective paper benefits from the fascinating collaborative approach of seven authors who bring their diverse scholarly perspectives to the table. This approach allows for a holistic examination, exploration and cutting-edge treatment of the subject. It provides different viewpoints and insights that enrich the discussion on “listening.” The use of multiple contexts and examples from various settings in Sweden adds depth to the exploration of listening to children. For a reader, there are methodological aspects which drive the reader to ask and long to know more.

The collective piece covers a wide range of themes related to listening to children such as education, child protection, and children with disabilities. I find this breadth informative. It could be even more powerful if the authors connected these themes and discussed commonalities and differences in how listening is understood and practiced across these contexts. There is an implicit question in the narrative of this paper: How can professionals in various fields improve their practices regarding listening to children, given the insights provided in this piece? While the text is primarily focused on Sweden, it provides an interesting discussion on issues that have global ramifications. This is an important piece that asks very important questions to those of us who study or work in the field.

“Doing” listening through empathetic attunement (Open peer review)

Anna Sparmann, Linköping University

This is an impressive collective piece where the authors together unpack how listening to/with/around/beyond children’s voices is accomplished by different groups of, mainly professional, adults in different social, cultural and institutional practices. The authors’ different outlooks to listening make me slow down my reading so as to carefully listen to their solid critical reflections and arguments. What I hear is an urge to expand the complexity of listening by situating what should be listened to, who should listen to whom, and how listening can be accomplished in practice. By putting, as the authors have done, different practices next to one another the reader is offered a new vocabulary for listening that can give insights beyond taken-for-granted norms of what it means to listen to children. Wordings like for example: orchestrated listening, listening as a professional skill, listening as dialogical, feeling listened to, listening to actions and listening to silences of choice, offer complex ways of thinking about listening. The authors also illuminate how listening, even with the best of intentions, can fall into simple normative routines, for example, when children are offered both to speak and be listened to without consequential actions taken by adults to interpret or meet their expressed needs, dreams and wishes. How do we, I wonder, equip children so that they become able and have the skills to listen beyond adults’ ways of using listening as simply “paying attention?” No matter who listens to whom—adult to child, child to adult and child to child—the text makes me urge for “doing” listening through “empathetic attunement”. That is to learn the “capacity to think and feel oneself into the inner life of another person” (Kohut quoted in Lipari, 2014: 207). By challenging, questioning, and clearly thinking through what is taken for granted with listening to children; the authors of this piece do just that. They stay with the complexity of listening and, in so doing, they suggest ways forward for how to listen on children’s terms, may it be listening to verbal accounts, actions, and/or silences. In an elegant and non-moralizing way this text suggests that it is due time for child/childhood studies to re-think listening. This is done without generating static dichotomies between children and adults. Rather, the authors, in skillful ways, point to how their exploration across multiple distinctive and unique practices offer new possible listening positions for both children and adults. They give all of us a brilliant toolbox that needs to be well managed for the future.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

We wish to thank our colleagues at Child Studies, Linköping University, for their feedback and suggestions on an earlier draft of the paper. A special thanks is dedicated to Alex Orrmalm for her particularly careful reading of the introduction and conclusion. Our deepest gratitude is also extended to Marek Tesar and Anna Sparrman for agreeing to write the open reviews.

Funding

The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by Department of Thematic Studies: Child Studies, Linköping University.

ORCID iDs

Myung Hwa Baldini

Rebecka Tiefenbacher

Effrosyni Terzoglou

Joacim Strand

Veronica Hällqvist

Emilia Holmbom Strid

Olga Anatoli

Anna Sparrman

Marek Tesar

Author biographies

Myung Hwa Baldini is a Ph.D. student at the department of Thematic Studies – Child Studies at Linköping University, Sweden. In her dissertation project, she investigates how school holidays are shaped in Swedish school-age educare, with focus on children’s activities and perspectives on school holidays. Her research concerns children’s possibilities for leisure and children’s everyday lives in institutional settings.

Rebecka Tiefenbacher is a Ph.D. student at the Department of Thematic Studies – Child Studies at Linköping University, Sweden. Her dissertation project centers a leisure space for young children with disabilities (e.g. ADHD, autism), with a specific focus on children’s actions and activities. Rebecka’s background is in interdisciplinary childhood studies and gender studies and her research interests relate to children’s non-verbal participation and representation in research, marginalized childhoods, and the intersection of childhood and disability.

Effrosyni Terzoglou is a Ph.D. student at Linköping University in the Department of Thematic Studies, Child Studies. With a background including a secondary school teacher degree, her research interests are in children’s voices, experiences, and emotions as well as in pedagogy and educational practices. In her dissertation project, she explores children’s emotions in their stories about assessments in Swedish middle schools.

Joacim Strand is a Ph.D. student at the Department of Thematic Studies – Child Studies at Linköping University, Sweden. In his dissertation project, Joacim studies how children and youth’s self-harming behavior is constructed as a problem in medical as well as in media discourses. His study focuses on how affects, suffering and subjectivity are articulated in late modern society.

Veronica Hällqvist is a Ph.D. student at the Department of Thematic Studies – Child Studies, at Linköping University, Sweden. She has a background as a social worker and has spent several years working with children and their families within child protective services in Sweden. Currently, her research interests are centered around foster family care, specifically focusing on the recruitment of foster families through intermunicipal cooperation.

Emilia Holmbom Strid is a Ph.D. in Child Studies, currently employed at Barnafrid, Department of Biomedical and Clinical Sciences at Linköping University, Sweden. Barnafrid is a national centre with the purpose of gathering and disseminating knowledge about violence and other abuse in relation to children. Emilia has an interdisciplinary background combining psychology, philosophy, and sociology. Her doctoral project explored young children’s social interaction (in peer groups, and with caregivers) in relation to the situated process of moral and emotional socialization, with focus on laughter, excitement, and suspense in young children’s social worlds.

Olga Anatoli is is a Ph.D. student at the Department of Thematic Studies – Child Studies at Linköping University, Sweden. Her research concerns bilingual early childhood education. Olga has background is in applied linguistics (PhD 2015, UCLA). Multimodal conversation analysis, second language teaching and learning, and social interaction are her areas of expertise.

Anna Sparrman is Professor in Child Studies at the interdisciplinary Department of Thematic Studies, Linköping University, Sweden. She is also Visiting Professor in child culture at the Faculty of Education, Department of Arts and Cultural Studies, Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences. She is an interdisciplinary child studies researcher exploring and challenging taken for granted theoretical ideas about children. She undertakes both theoretical and empirical investigations of social and cultural norms and values enacted by children and adults. Her latest ongoing research project is Children’s cultural heritage – the visual voices of the archive.

Marek Tesar is a Professor, Head of School and the Associate Dean International at the Faculty of Education and Social Work at the University of Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand. He is also the director of the Centre for Global Childhoods. His scholarship is focused on the philosophy of education, early childhood education and childhood studies in New Zealand and cross-country contexts. His latest research is concerned with the construction of childhoods and children’s voice, notions of place/space, and methodological and philosophical thinking around ontologies and the ethics of researching these notions.

References

Andrén

Cekaite

(2017) Don’t laugh! Socialization of laughter and smiling in pre-school and school settings. In: Bateman

Church

(eds) Children’s Knowledge-in-Interaction: Studies in Conversation Analysis. Singapore: Springer Singapore, pp.127–147.

Andrén

Zetterqvist Nelson

(2022a) Att lyssna på barn. Om lyssnandets teori och etik. Barn, 40(3): 101–118.

Andrén

Zetterqvist Nelson

(2022b) Introduktion: Att lyssna på barn – nya infallsvinklar, nya perspektiv. Barn – forskning om barn og barndom i Norden 40(3): 1–7.

Bateman

(2020) Young children’s affective stance through embodied displays of emotion during tellings. Text & Talk 40(5): 643–668.

Bindeman

(2017) Silence in Philosophy, Literature, and Art. Boston, United States: Brill. Available at: http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/linkoping-ebooks/detail.action?docID=5024390

Björk-Willén

(2022) Språkutvecklande förskola: en kunskapsöversikt om språkutvecklande arbete i förskola. Stockholm: Ifous.

Blennow

(2020) Lärare bör ge mer utrymme för tystnad. Skolverket. Available at: https://www.skolverket.se/skolutveckling/forskning-och-utvarderingar/artiklar-om-forskning/larare-bor-ge-mer-utrymme-for-tystnad (accessed 6 September 2023).

Butler

(1997) Psychic Life of Power. Theories in Subjection. Redwood City: Stanford University Press.

Cekaite

Björk-Willén

(2018) Enchantment in storytelling: Co-operation and participation in children’s aesthetic experience. Linguistics and Education 48: 52–60.

10.

Cekaite

Holm Kvist

(2017) The comforting touch: Tactile intimacy and talk in managing children’s distress. Research on Language and Social Interaction 50(2): 109–127.

11.

Chaney

(2017) Psyche on the Skin. London: Reaktions books ltd.

12.

Clark

(2017) Listening to Young Children, Expanded Third Edition: A Guide to Understanding and Using the Mosaic Approach. London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers.

13.

Corsaro

(2018) The Sociology of Childhood, 5th ed. Los Angeles: Sage.

14.

Dauenhauer

(1973) On silence. Research in Phenomenology, 3: 9–27. Available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/24654255 (accessed 6 September 2023).

15.

Elvstrand

Lago

(2019) ‘You know that we are not able to go to McDonald’s’: Processes of doing participation in Swedish leisure time centres. Early Child Development and Care 189(13): 2156–2166.

16.

Elvstrand

Närvänen

(2016) Children’s own perspectives on participation in leisure-time centers in Sweden. American Journal of Educational Research 4(6): 496–503.

17.

Ericsson

(2015) Children’s agency: The struggles of the powerless. In Sköld

Swain

(eds) Apologies and the Legacy of Abuse of Children in “Care”. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp.42–54.

18.

Fidyk

(2013) Attuned to silence: A pedagogy of presence. In Malhotra

Rowe

(eds) Silence, Feminism, Power: Reflections at the Edges of Sound. London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp.114–128. Available at: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057/9781137002372_9 (accessed 6 September 2023).

19.

Foucault

(1988) The political technology of individuals. In: Luther

Gutman

Hutton

(eds) Technologies of the Self: A Seminar With Michel Foucault. Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press. pp.145–163.

20.

Gallacher

Gallagher

(2008) Methodological immaturity in childhood research? Thinking through ‘participatory methods’. Childhood 15(4): 499–516.

21.

Gustafsson Nyckel

(2020) Vägen mot det undervisande fritidshemmet. In Haglund

Gustafsson Nyckel

, et al. (eds) Fritidshemmets pedagogik i en ny tid. Malmö: Gleerups Utbildning AB, pp.59–77.

22.

Horgan

Forde

Martin

, et al. (2017) Children’s participation: Moving from the performative to the social. Children’s Geographies 15(3): 274–288.

23.

James

(2007) Giving voice to children’s voices: Practices and problems, pitfalls and potentials. American Anthropologist 109(2): 261–272.

24.

Komulainen

(2007) The ambiguity of the child’s ‘voice’ in social research. Childhood 14(1): 11–28.

25.

Lipari

(2014) Listening, Thinking, Being: Toward an Ethics of Attunement. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.

26.

McLeod

(2008) Listening to Children: A Practitioner’s Guide. London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers.

27.

Orrmalm

Annerbäck

Sparrman

(2022) Listening by ‘staying with’ the absent child. BARN - Forskning Om Barn Og Barndom i Norden 40(3): 70–84.

28.

Sandin

Halldén

(2003) Välfärdsstatens omvandling och en ny barndom. In: Sandin

Halldén

(eds.) Barnets bästa: en antologi om barndomens innebörder och Välfärdens organisering. Stockholm: Brutus Östlings förlag Symposium, pp.7–24.

29.

Skolverket (2022) Läroplan för grundskolan, förskoleklassen och fritidshemmet 2022 Lgr 22. Upp. 1:2. Stockholm: Skolverket.

30.

Socialdepartementet (2011) Vanvård I social barnavård-slutrapport (SOU 2011:61). Elanders Sverige AB. Available at: https://www.regeringen.se/49b6a1/contentassets/e568dc8c155d4a599a4a9177e839b3f5/vanvard-i-social-barnavard—slutrapport-sou-201161(accessed 31 August 2023).

31.

Socialtjänstlag (2001) Socialdepartementet (SFS 2001:453). https://www.riksdagen.se/sv/dokument-lagar/dokument/svensk-forfattningssamling/socialtjanstlag-2001453_sfs-2001-453 (accessed 31 August 2023).

32.

Spyrou

(2011) The limits of children’s voices: From authenticity to critical, reflexive representation. Childhood 18(2): 151–165.

33.

Spyrou

(2016) Researching children’s silences: Exploring the fullness of voice in childhood research, Childhood 23(1): 7–21.

34.

Steggals

(2015) Making Sense of Self-harm. The Cultural Meaning and Social Context of Nonsuicidal Self-injury. London: Palgrave McMillan.

35.

Strid

(Forthcoming) Choreographing Young Children’s Participation in Teacher-Led Activities Through Suspense Practices. Research on Children and Social Interaction.

36.

Tesar

Guerrero

Anttila

, et al. (2021) Infantographies. Educational Philosophy and Theory. Epub ahead of print 7 November 2021. DOI: 10.1080/00131857.2021.2009341.

37.

The Swedish National Agency for Education (2019) Curriculum for the Preschool-Lpfö 18. Stockholm: Skolverket.

38.

Tiefenbacher

(2023) Finding methods for the inclusion of all children: Advancing participatory research with children with disabilities. Children & Society 37(3): 771–785.

39.

Twum-Danso Imoh

Okyere

(2020) Towards a more holistic understanding of child participation: Foregrounding the experiences of children in Ghana and Nigeria. Children and Youth Services Review 112: 104927.

40.

Underwood

Chan

Koller

, et al. (2015) Understanding young children’s capabilities: Approaches to interviews with young children experiencing disability. Child Care in Practice 21(3): 220–237.

41.

Winther Jørgensen

(2015) Patient-centred decision-making? Biocitizens between evidence-based medicine and self-determination. Evidence & Policy 11(3): 311–329.