Constructions of agency in children’s cultural and linguistic brokering practices

Abstract

Constructions of children’s agency have been an influential and dominant arena for discussion since the emergence of the ‘new’ paradigm of childhood in the 1990s. Cross-disciplinary studies recognise the different social, cultural and temporal influences upon perceptions of childhood and acknowledge the impact of such constructions on how children’s agency is understood and realised. Many of the definitions of agency reflect Article 12 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, which states the child’s right to be involved in decisions affecting them. However, as with other articles of the convention, Article 12 is prone to subjective adult interpretation predicated on assumptions of competence and capability, and subject to the same uneasy tension between participation, protection and provision which characterises the convention more broadly. Furthermore, the presumed relationship between children’s involvement in decision making as an indicator of agency is misleading. This paper argues that children’s agency is a poorly defined concept, whose lack of clarity contributes to children being constrained as active change agents within and beyond contexts which directly affect them. Using the context of child language brokers, the paper argues that despite offering children the ‘socio-culturally mediated capacity to act’ brokering practices frequently take place in response to adult-determined objectives, rather than in contexts freely chosen by the child, potentially compromising their agentic potential. This paper draws upon the findings from Crutchley’s doctoral thesis which used Biographical Narrative Interpretive Method to explore the retrospective narratives of adults who assumed the role of cultural and linguistic brokers during their childhoods.

Introduction

The concept of children’s agency has been an evolving area of study across many academic disciplines in recent decades, influenced by, but not restricted to constructions of childhood agency emanating from the ‘new’ sociology of childhood (James and Prout, 1997). Constructions of children’s agency focus variably on children’s social competence, including children’s capacity to influence change in their own lives and that of others, the socio-relational factors which facilitate or constrain agency and structural constraints (domestic and public) which are influenced by assumptions of children’s dependency, passivity and vulnerability. Whilst this article reflects primarily on sociological constructions of agency, the author acknowledges that children’s agency may be conceptualised differently within other academic disciplines. However, there is insufficient scope in this article to explore such differences in depth.

Despite these varying disciplinary conceptualisations, there is recognition that contextual factors play a significant role in how children’s agency is perceived and realised (Bergnehr, 2018; Gurdal and Sorbring, 2018; Sorbring and Kuczynski, 2018). Using the context of child language brokering and drawing upon constructions of agency from broad critical frameworks, this paper will consider the opportunities and challenges of framing children’s roles as cultural and linguistic brokers through an agentic lens.

According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development the term agency suggests ‘the opportunity for students to participate in the world, thereby influencing others, events or circumstances’ (OECD, 2018: 30, in Gottschalk and Borhan, 2023: 10). Although the OECD report focused solely on examples of children’s participation within an educational context, an arena undoubtedly structured according to traditional adult-child hierarchies, its authors recognise that opportunities for children to make decisions and engage in autonomous actions present themselves in children’s everyday lives concluding that ‘active participants in settings such as their local communities, and their participation in everyday contexts might be more meaningful and impactful for their daily lives’ (Percy-Smith and Taylor, 2008: 33, in Gottschalk and Borhan, 2023: 10). Cultural and linguistic brokering may be seen to fall within this category given the emerging recognition of the contribution it makes to family resettlement post-migration (Bergnehr, 2018; Rumbaut 2015 ).

The potential relationship between children’s agency and their cultural and linguistic brokering roles was an identified theme in Crutchley’s doctoral thesis (2022). Using Biographical Narrative Interpretive Method (Chamberlayne et al., 2002; Wengraf, 2004) with five adult participants ranging in age from 24 to 65, (F = 4, M = 1) whose migration to the UK was influenced by economic, post-colonial, and asylum-seeking ‘push-pull’ factors (Bartram et al., 2014), the thesis explored participants’ retrospective interpretations of their many brokering practices. Participants’ recollections included translating letters between home and school, face to face translations in educational, health and welfare systems contexts, explaining linguistic nuances and cultural systems (e.g. the expectation of parental engagement in school activities, the meaning of idiomatic expressions) and navigating public transport systems. The retrospective interpretations of these brokering practices indicated that whilst for some participants there were tensions, particularly during adolescence (Lazarevic, 2016) most of the participants valued the contribution they made to their family, with some framing these practices as a natural extension of established caregiving roles (Bauer, 2016). Whilst none of the participants specifically identified these roles as agentic, the responsibilities they assumed and the impact upon themselves and their family post-migration reflect recognised definitions of agency within the academic field. Nonetheless, questions remain about the extent to which these roles were freely chosen by the child, thereby requiring further consideration.

Constructions of agency

Since the emergence of the ‘new’ paradigm of childhood in the early 1990s, constructions of children’s agency have continued to be an arena for debate. Reflecting the same agency versus structure dichotomy which has characterised many sociological debates, within the sociology of childhood the debates focus on the extent to which children are understood to be active agents whose contribution to family life and within broader societal contexts is recognised and valued. In a shift away from conceptions of children as adults in waiting (Qvortrop, 2004) contemporary paradigms of childhood stress the significance of acknowledging children as ‘beings’ rather than ‘becomings,’ (Qvortrop, 1997) focusing on children’s lived experiences in the present time, although such binaries are refuted by Uprichard (2008), as discussed below. Recognising children as ‘beings’ requires acknowledging them as rights-bearing autonomous individuals whose collective and individual status in both private and public spheres needs upgrading (Mayall, 2000). Mayall’s commitment to challenging constructions of childhood which position children as vulnerable, dependent, and passive (Mayall, 2000) reflects her concern that children’s exclusion from civic society mirrors the historic exclusion of women and other marginalised groups from participation in decision making processes. As discussed below, the invisibility and /or dismissal of children’s cultural and linguistic brokering within mainstream contexts (Cline et al., 2014), illustrates Mayall’s concerns, despite the pivotal role that brokering practices play in family resettlement post-migration (Rumbaut, 2015).

Mayall’s association of agency with children’s citizenship resonates with the situated agency of children and young people in the fractured political landscape of Northern Ireland as discussed by Leonard (2009) who recognises that children’s agency is constrained by structures over which they may have no control. Leonard argues that children act as agents in specific contexts characterised by prevalent adult-child hierarchies. Drawing upon the work of Semashko (2004: 5 in Leonard, 2009: 119), Leonard recognises that such hierarchies are reproduced and sustained by notions of citizenship and competence, echoing Mayall’s concerns, specifically that before the age of 18 the child is located outside of society and is perceived has having little to no social importance. Leonard (2015) subsequently employs the term ‘generagency’ to denote the way in which children’s agency is constrained by generational hierarchies within domestic and public contexts predicated on developmentalist notions of children’s social competence. However, Leonard also acknowledges that despite such hierarchies, children can also transform familial, social and political structures albeit under certain conditions, suggestive of Gidden’s theory of structuration (Giddens, 1984). Citing the positioning of children as non-political during the Troubles in Northern Ireland, (despite their contribution to street rioting), Leonard remarks on the paradox of children being perceived as powerless yet pivotal to the political process of the Belfast Agreement 1998 (Belfast Agreement, 1998) further reflecting challenges to the structure versus agency dichotomy (Giddens, 1984; Jones and Karsten, 2003). This paradox is similarly evident in many of the assumptions about children’s roles as cultural and linguistic brokers.

This capacity of children to transform hierarchical structures is also recognised by Revis (2016), whose Bourdieusian perspective on children’s agency within family language practices employs the term ‘cleft-habitus’ to describe the processes through which children influence the socialisation practices of their parents as discussed below. Rather than positioning Bourdieu’s notion of cultural reproduction as a unidirectional process from adult to child, Revis identifies key strategies used by bilingual children which impact upon the linguistic behaviours of their parents and other family members, for example, resistance to parent language choice, metalinguistic interpretation, language brokering, sociocultural socialisation and majority language teaching (Gafaranga, 2010 in Revis, 2016: 3). This bidirectional model of socialisation reflects Kuczynski’s critique of the assumed linear relationship between adults and children, which fails to acknowledge children’s capacity to transform traditional norms (Kuczynski, 2003, in Kuczynski and De Mol, 2015).

It would appear evident from Revis’ observations that children are manifesting agency, according to the definitions identified above. Further, Revis’ contention that children act as socialising agents thereby challenging notions of child-adult dependency echoes Uprichard (2008) who argues that traditional models of adult/child dependencies are insufficient to describe familial relationships, which may be characterised by mutual dependency according to specific contexts, a process which Guo, 2014: 78 in Revis, 2016: 3) defines as reciprocal scaffolding.

The rights-based models of children’s agency, advocated by Mayall and Leonard, are complemented within the sociology of childhood, with models of agency which focus on assumptions of children’s social competence, and the extent to which such competence enables children to enact change within specific contexts, or ‘arenas for action’ (Hutchby and Moran-Ellis, 1998). Prout and James’ (1997) sociology of childhood advocates that ‘children are and must be seen as active in the construction and determination of their own social lives, the lives of those around them and of the societies in which they live’ (James and Prout, 1997: 9). The paradigm therefore reinforces the notion that children can transform existing structures through their behaviours and choices. Liebel’s (2004) recognition of children as workers, within the home and in a variety of ways in the labour market, becoming active consumers and influencing family decision making is a further example of children’s capacity to enact change.

The capability approach: Agency freedom and agency achievement

To distinguish between such competence-based models and the rights-based approaches espoused by Mayall and Leonard, Sen’s capability model (Sen, 1985 in Hart and Brando, 2017) although not traditionally applied to the context of childhood, is a useful critical framework. Sen’s model introduces the concepts of agency freedom and agency achievement, asserting that having the competence to act agentically offers no guarantee of agency being achieved. The conditions necessary for potential agency to be realised include the extent to which the context is meaningful for the individual, contingent primarily on that context being freely chosen. Evidently, for children this may be challenging, due to the generational and societal structures identified by Mayall and Leonard. Hart and Brando’s (2017) application of Sen’s model to the context of children’s wellbeing, participation, and agency within educational settings, illustrates the limitations of traditional constructs of children’s agency and highlights the ways in which constructions of agency may differ between adults and children. The authors acknowledge that children's capacity to make independent decisions is constrained by adult assumptions about their ‘best interests’, thereby limiting the usefulness of Sen’s model when applied to the context of children’s agency. Referencing the UNCRC (United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child; UNESCO, 1989), the authors recognise that the agency freedoms endorsed in, for example articles 12 and 13, are balanced by adult assumptions about children’s evolving capacities and the tension between protection and participation. Sen’s capability approach identifies the processes which facilitate and constrain children’s agency freedom, referred to as ‘conversion factors’ (Hart and Brando, 2017: 298), including resources, environment, individual endowment, values and aspirations, capabilities, and functioning. Such factors reflect the core components of both rights-based and social-competence based constructs of children’s agency and reiterate the significance of social contexts on children’s capacity to manifest agency.

Contextual factors

The conversion factors identified in Sen’s distinction between agency freedom and agency achievement may be explored from a socio-relational perspective. As previously noted, there is broad consensus on the significance of contextual factors which constrain or enable children’s agency, the socio-relational dynamics between adults and children being one such context. Within this construction, children’s agency is influenced by their relationships to others, within the family, with their peers, and with other adults in their social sphere. For example, Gurdal and Sorbring (2018) explore children’s perceptions of their agency across a range of relational dynamics, parent-child, teacher-pupil and child-child, concluding that such perceptions vary according to context, relationships, and existing hierarchical structures. Perhaps not surprisingly, the children in Gurdal and Sorbring’s study perceived their agency to be less suppressed in their peer relationships.

The significance of agency within peer relationships is further considered, from a psychosocial perspective situated within migration studies, in Crafter, Rosen and Meetoo (2021) study which explored the role of child migrants as carers for each other within a socio-political landscape characterised by hostility and mistrust. The authors reiterate the recognition from Mayall and Leonard that many of the roles that children perform for the benefit of others, as child labourers, as activists, as carers and as cultural and linguistic brokers are either invisible, pitied or condemned for deviating from Global North assumptions of what it means to be a child. As has been discussed, narratives which position children as vulnerable, dependent and passive fail to consider the social and cultural realities of many children’s childhoods, wherein children’s agentic potential is neither explicitly nor implicitly recognised.

Participation and protection: An uneasy tension

The relationship between children’s rights to participate in decisions affecting them, and their right to be protected from contexts considered harmful has been recognised as key tension in children’s rights literature (Carroll, 2021). As discussed below, within the context of children’s cultural and linguistic brokering, this tension is reflected in the benefits vs burdens dichotomy.

The constructions of children’s agency discussed above demonstrate recognition of children’s participatory rights and acknowledge children’s social competence when engaging in activities relevant to their daily experiences. However, whilst there may be some consensus within the academic arena, within mainstream contexts perspectives may lean towards a protective rather than a participatory stance. In the context of child brokering this may be reflected through the focus on the burdens of brokering reflecting a traditional positioning of the child as vulnerable, passive and dependent. Cline et al.’s (2014) research identified ambivalence and ambiguity towards the role of child language brokers within mainstream educational contexts, with such practices being discouraged yet commonplace, due to lack of alternative interpreting opportunities. The potential of such practices to confer agency, and indeed be of benefit to child language brokers and their families, as discussed below, is limited by such ambivalence. Citing the British Psychological Society’s (BPS) position statement which advocates against using children as brokers, as it confers adult responsibilities which may expose children to sensitive and inappropriate conversations (Cline et al., 2014), the authors acknowledge that nevertheless such practices continue. Furthermore, their research, consistent with a broad range of research with child language brokers and their families, recognises that for many parents there is a preference for deploying their child in this role due to their sensitivity and awareness of the family’s specific context.

For some researchers, however, children’s participatory rights are inherently linked to their capacity to protect themselves from harm. From within the field of child protection, for example, Mitchell et al. (2022) critique the assumed tension between children’s participatory and protection rights arguing that the latter relies on children’s agency within the former.

However, the assumption within much of the academic literature that children’s participation necessarily confers agency is limiting and simplistic. As has been discussed, socio-contextual factors frame children’s participation according to the reproduction of cultural norms. Such framing may interpret children’s participation as contributory without explicitly recognising it as agentic. For example, in Crutchley’s (2022) research, children’s brokering roles were positioned as merely an extension of the caregiving responsibilities characteristic of many Global South communities.

So, this is not normal for you (researcher), coming from a Western culture, whereas me, coming from the other part of the world, it’s something of a norm there, so for me it’s quite normal to be counted as responsible at a young age (Crutchley, 2022:171).

I felt proud to help my mum. . . it’s a big responsibility, but I would feel more happy to do it myself than my mum having to rely on someone else to do it (Crutchley, 2022: 171).

Such culturally situated findings were echoed in research by Orellana (2015) and Bauer (2016).

Indeed, the assumed consensus towards the significance of children’s agency has itself been subject to accusations of ethnocentric and classist bias. Lancy, (2012) challenges the unequivocal acceptance of children’s agency accusing its advocates of imposing singular narratives of children’s experiences as universalist. Lancy’s critique centres primarily on ‘agency advocates’ imposition of Global North, bourgeois conceptualisations of agency upon parent-child practices which may be characterised by conformity, obedience and compliance. According to Lancy, failure to recognise the significance of cultural context contributes to uncritical assumptions about the relevance of children’s agency for global childhoods, thereby denying the significance of anthropological studies.

Cultural differences in how children’s agency is understood and realised are similarly reflected in Gurdal and Sorbring’s (2018) research which acknowledges the influence of family dynamics upon receptivity and advocacy for children’s agency. Citing research from Bjornberg, (2002, in Gurdal and Sorbring, 2018: 2), which revealed that Swedish parents were less authoritative in their parenting and more receptive to children’s participation in family decision-making, the authors reiterate the significance of social contexts in how children’s participation is perceived. This significance is further heightened through Burke and Kuczynski’s (2018) research exploring Jamaican mother’s response to children resistance strategies, which reflected an authoritarian parenting approach rejecting of children’s agency in the form of their active and passive resistance to parental commands.

The discussions above demonstrate the extent to which agency may be explicitly acknowledged and valued or implicit, that is, evidencing agency according to multiple theoretical constructions without necessarily being recognised as such.

Herein lies the provocation of this article. Within existing structural and generational hierarchies, underpinned by socio-cultural and developmental ideologies of children’s competence and compounded by lack of political recognition, to what extent does children’s agency manifest itself in contexts which are individually meaningful, freely chosen and explicitly recognised? In response to the questions posed by these differing constructs of children’s agency, this article reflects on the role of children’s cultural and linguistic brokering practices, as examples of the capacity of children to influence social behaviours within specific contexts resulting from their enhanced competence to navigate multiple systems in the private and public sphere following family resettlement.

Family resettlement and children’s brokering roles

Family resettlement following migration demands significant readjustment (Bhouris et al., 1997; Schwartz et al., 2010, Suarez-Orozc and Suarez-Orozc, 2013). Factors impacting upon family resettlement, include (the) push-pull migration drivers, the trauma of the migration journey and reception in the host country, degrees of cultural assonance between country of departure and country of resettlement, and linguistic competence in the language of the country of resettlement (Bartram et al., 2014; Bhatia and Ram, 2001; Killian, 2011; Navas et al., 2007). Children and young people often have a distinct advantage over other family members during the resettlement period, through their enrolment in the school system which exposes them to the social, cultural, and linguistic practices of their new location (Rumbaut, 2015). Subsequently, they are frequently relied upon as cultural and linguistic brokers to facilitate family access to multiple ‘microsystem’ contexts (Bauer, 2016; Crafter and Iqbal, 2020; Cline et al., 2014; McQuillan and Tse, 1995). Such roles challenge orthodox generational hierarchies and position children as ‘experts’ thereby dismantling traditional relational positions. As such, children’s brokering practices reflect many of the constructions of children’s agency considered above. They have the capacity to enact change, influence decision making and affect the behaviours of others. For example, Luykx (2005) refers to child language brokers as socialising agents whose language competencies can influence family decision making in multiple ways, not least through the child’s ability to select from two or more communication forms and thus control the linguistic interactions between parent and child. Thus, many of these examples of socialisation reflect agentic practices which are both meaningful and freely chosen and echo Kuczynski and De Moll’s (2015) bidirectional model of socialisation.

In Crutchley’s (2022) research, responsibility for family decision making was explicitly directed from parents to their children.

They always say at home ‘you’re the one making the rules. If you say this, we’re going to do this, because you say it’. (Crutchley, 2022: 163).

I used to talk a lot, and they assumed I was clever because you only needed to take me somewhere once, and I will remember the route, so they would say ‘you’re the best person, you know where the home office is, you speak much more clearly. . ..’ (Crutchley, 2022: 141).

Children’s cultural and linguistic brokering practices

Children’s language brokering has been the subject of cross-disciplinary academic research for several years. As early as 1995, McQuillan and Tse identified the diverse ways in which children may broker their families’ access to the cultural, linguistic and social norms of new societies post-migration, recognising that child brokers engage in far more complex roles than straightforward translating and interpretation practices. For example, children may be required to transmit information between dominant and minority communities in culturally sensitive ways thereby relying on enhanced metalinguistic competence. Nash (2017) recounts the brokering practices of an Arab-American adolescent who reframed the translation of a medical prognosis to his parent to ensure it reflected cultural perspectives of ill health.

Such transcultural brokering is recognised by Orellana (2015), who refers to the myriad roles that children engage in which go beyond the traditional interpreting and translating roles that are suggested by the term brokering, preferring to use the term para-phrasing (Orellana, 2003: 7) as a more accurate definition of the complex metalinguistic skills required to navigate between socio-culturally informed communication practices.

Lazarevic (2015, in Lazarevic, 2016) introduces the term ‘procedural brokering’ to describe the roles children engage in which introduce their families to ‘the nuances of mainstream culture’, (Lazarevic, 2016: 79) acknowledging that (migrant) children utilise myriad forms of cultural knowledge to influence the adaptation of their family post-migration, whilst simultaneously juggling conflicting and competing identities, particularly during adolescence. Lazarevic’s inclusion of adolescent brokers’ feelings towards their brokering roles echoes the resentment felt by participants in Love and Buriel’s (2007) research which may manifest in the choices they make about the context and frequency of their brokering practices.

Gyogi’s recognition that children’s agency is socio-culturally situated, is particularly relevant to notions of children’s agency within the context of children’s linguistic and cultural brokering practices. Gyogi’s argument rests on children’s perception of their agency, both generally and within specific contexts, and how an individual chooses to enact their agency through ‘participation, action and deliberate non-action’ (Mercer 2012, in Gyogi, 2014: 2). Echoing many of the debates discussed above, Gyogi argues that structural constraints are socio-culturally influenced, but can also be reproduced, intensified, changed, or mediated by children’s agentic behaviours, offering meaning and purpose to the child. Further, Gyogi draws upon Lantolf’s and Thorne’s description of the ways in which children’s agency can be enabled and constrained by the ‘moment by moment unfolding of interaction’ (Lantolf and Thorne, 2006: 234, in Gyogi, 2014: 2).

Despite such recognition of the metalinguistic skills and cultural sensitivity required by child brokers, awareness of such roles outside of the contexts in which they are performed is limited. As cited earlier, Cline et al.’s (2014) research exploring language brokering in schools found that children and adults who had no personal experience of brokering, were unaware of the ubiquity of such roles for their bilingual counterparts, despite the contribution that such practices had on school cohesion and family integration. The invisibility of children’s cultural and linguistic brokering roles and their impact on family resettlement within mainstream contexts, is suggestive of the low status children occupy within societal institutions, particularly those from families whose cultural capital is diminished (Brooker, 2002) and whose ‘race’ positions them as ‘othered’ within mainstream contexts (Kromidas, 2016).

Furthermore, where child brokering practices have been recognised, concerns have consistently been raised about the burdens placed on child brokers, and the challenges associated with child brokering in contexts which expose children and their families to negative or harmful narratives, emanating from their diminished status firstly as children and secondly as migrants (Crafter and Iqbal, 2020) reflecting the participation versus protection tension discussed above. However, concerns about the burdensome nature of brokering may also reflect ethnocentric ideologies based on white middle-class monolingual professional’s assumptions of ‘good’ childhoods, which reflect Guo’s argument that constructs of childhood competency are overly influenced by developmental paradigms at the expense of acknowledging culturally appropriate practice (Bauer, 2016). However as considered earlier, the extent to which such practices are perceived as agentic is contingent on a range of socio-cultural and contextual factors (Lancy, 2012).

Literature exploring the benefits versus burden polarities of child brokering identifies the importance of familial relationships, brokering context, child disposition and competencies and developmental factors as key influences, for example having their brokering roles valued and supported within the family, feeling equipped, linguistically and socially, to navigate the brokering situation (Weisskirch, 2017). In Crutchley’s research, (Crutchley, 2022) participants commented on how their brokering roles nurtured family relationships through their recognition of the challenges experienced by their parents and other family members.

Reviewing these roles retrospectively, from an adult perspective, participants simultaneously demonstrated pride in their capacity to take on complex roles at a young age, combined with reticence about letting their own children take on such roles:

I feel like I must have been mature, I must have been a mature child (Crutchley, 2022: 141)

We were expected to do certain things, but with my own kids, they are laid back, it’s like, we were obliged to do it, but they’re not. I’m not sure if I could put my kids. through that (Crutchley, 2022:141).

Such polarities reflect the competing priorities between participatory and protection rights as discussed earlier.

Retrospective accounts of children’s brokering roles in Crutchley’s research (Crutchley, 2022) therefore reflect this benefit/burden polarity with participants identifying clear examples of socialising agency, through shaping the language use of the home environment, and navigating complex systemic processes to facilitate parental access to mainstream institutions.

When applying Sen’s criteria for agency, namely the extent to which the contexts for brokering are freely chosen and meaningful for the child, a key factor considered was the prime beneficiary of the brokering activity. Even brokering practices which were predicated on adult agendas, e.g., translating letters between school and home, could be perceived as meaningful for the child depending on the context, for example, conveying information about school trips, to communicate the socio-cultural significance of such events within the English school system to parents whose experiences of schooling did not feature these experiences. Children’s agency in such contexts reflected both their social competence (Hutchby and Moran-Ellis, 1998), that is, their ability to navigate cultural and linguistic differences, and their capacity to enact change (Gyogi, 2014) through gaining access to activities enjoyed by their peers, thereby facilitating social belonging. Further examples of agency reflected in Crutchley’s research reflect Mercer’s identification of non-action as an agentic act (Mercer, 2012, in Gyogi, 2014). Echoing research from Love and Buriel (2007), entering adolescence heralded a period of non-compliance with adult requests for brokering support for participants in Crutchley’s study (Crutchley, 2022). Non-compliance is just one of the positionalities identified as a strategy adopted by child brokers in Crafter and Iqbal’s (2020) research. Referring to Craft’s notion of the contact zone, (Pratt, 1991 in Crafter and Iqbal, 2020: 33), the authors highlight ways in which migrant children may respond to brokering contexts in which they feel they or their families are perceived negatively by mainstream professionals due to their migrant status. In addition to non-compliance, children may respond to such contexts on a continuum from compliance to active resistance. Crafter and Iqbal’s research identified three positionalities adopted by child brokers, ‘avoider’ (p. 35), which includes both reframing the language to reduce the potential for conflict and removing oneself from the context completely; ‘neutral or passive’ (p. 36), whereby children mirrored the behaviour of professional interpreters, to protect themselves from the emotional aspect of the brokering context, and ‘active broker’ (p. 37) which evidenced children’s ability to filter, modify and employ complex metalinguistic skills to make judgements about how to translate information between professional and parents. Regardless of the strategy chosen, the intent behind the response could be interpreted from an agentic perspective, not least due to its impact on the effectiveness of the brokering context itself and the counter response demanded of the adults present.

Whilst there is recognition, within the literature cited above of the agentic potential of child language brokering, there are inevitable concerns about the burden of such roles, particularly for younger children, and within sensitive brokering contexts. Crafter and Iqbal’s identification of the strategies used by children in challenging or uncomfortable brokering contexts, echo those adopted by adolescents in Crutchley’s (2022) research and align with the multiple definitions of agency discussed here. However, they also highlight the stressful and burdensome nature of some brokering contexts. As noted earlier, many of these concerns arise from Global North (GN) assumptions about ‘good childhoods’. Nevertheless, it should be acknowledged that such concerns ensure that framing brokering as agentic can be problematic. The contested nature of the literature on the benefits and burdens of child language brokers is reflected in the position adopted by the BPS (2008) which suggests avoiding deploying children as translators and relying on professional interpreters.

Socio-cultural influences

As alluded to earlier, constructions of agency are temporally and culturally mediated. Notions of generational hierarchies which position children as vulnerable and dependent are themselves influenced by socio-cultural definitions of children and childhood. Although it is widely accepted that childhood is a recognised structural component of all societies (Graf, 2015), the parameters distinguishing childhood and adulthood inevitably vary according to social, economic and cultural factors. For example, many of the commonplace caregiving and domestic roles performed by children from majority world communities might be viewed as exploitative according to minority world assumptions. Although such roles might fail to meet the definition of agency espoused by Sen (2006) with its focus on freely chosen, autonomous activity, findings from Boyden and Mann (2005) and Taefre (2014) suggest that the contribution children make to family and community is valued by children who assume these responsibilities. In the context of child brokering, such practices distort Western assumptions of child-adult dependency and challenge expected trajectories from childhood to adulthood (Crafter et al., 2015).

As has been noted, key finding from Crutchley’s retrospective study (Crutchley, 2022) was the framing, by some participants, of brokering practices as an extension of the care-giving responsibilities expected within their cultural context. Thus, rather than perceiving such expectations as burdensome, they were meaningful for the child not only for the benefits afforded them (e.g., access to school trips), but because they confirmed perceptions of cultural identity (Bauer, 2016; Crafter et al., 2015).

I helped my mum a lot, but I was happy to, and you know, if I wasn’t there, where would she go? I don’t want her to go outside and beg people. If someone else did it, I would feel ashamed, me being the child of my mother, why couldn’t I do it? (Crutchley, 2022: 173).

Sen’s notion of ‘freely chosen’ as a prerequisite of agency achievement is again worth revisiting here. The extent to which any activity is meaningful for a child is contingent on multiple external and internal factors, reflected in the conversion factors of Hart and Brando (2017). As noted above, relational influences are also a significant consideration in defining the term freely chosen from the child’s perspective. Successive research into children’s cultural and linguistic brokering cites the importance of positive familial relationships as conducive to effective brokering activities (Weisskirch, 2017). Such factors were evident in the narratives from the participants in Crutchley’s study who cited the feelings of self-efficacy emanating from their engagement in brokering activities (Crutchley, 2022).

Conclusion

This article has explored how children’s agency has been conceptualised, initially from within the sociology of childhood, and more recently from across multiple academic and professional disciplines. Using the context of children’s cultural and linguistic brokering practices constructions of agency have been evaluated, according to rights-based and competence-based models and drawing upon research from within the fields of psychology, anthropology and education. It is evident that the multiple procedural and transcultural brokering roles engaged in by children and adolescents reflect elements of multiple agency frameworks. Recognising that children’s agency may be constrained by generational and structural hierarchies in the private and public sphere, the examples of brokering from the academic literature across multiple disciplines and from Crutchley’s doctoral research (2022) illustrate that children may also transform existing structures through their brokering practices, not least due to the changed behaviours of the adults around them. Such constraints emanate from legitimate concerns about the impact upon children of brokering in contexts which are sensitive, politicised, and subject to the gaze of harmful narratives about migrant families (Crafter and Iqbal, 2020). Other concerns reflect limiting notions of children’s social status (Leonard, 2009; Mayall, 2000) and developmental competence. This article acknowledges the legitimacy of some of these concerns but argues that the benefits of brokering (Dorner et al., 2007; Gyogi, 2014; Kam and Lazarevic, 2014) and the pivotal role that children’s linguistic and cultural brokering practices have upon the lived experience of migrant children and their families (Rumbaut, 2015) must be visible, valued and explicit in order to influence how children’s agency continues to be defined and realised.