In the fields of childhood studies and the sociology of childhood, the concepts of children’s voice and agency have increasingly become buzzwords. While frequently invoked, they are often employed loosely and without sufficient critical engagement. Since the adoption of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) in 1989, there has been a growing global emphasis on the importance of listening to children and recognizing their right to express their views. Although this marked a significant milestone in the global discourse on children’s rights, scholars have pointed out numerous tensions and contradictions in how children’s voices and agency are conceptualized and implemented, particularly within normative liberal frameworks. The UNCRC, for example, foregrounds children as individuals with rights, yet it has also been criticized for reinforcing a Western normative model of childhood.

To begin with, such tensions relate to deeper questions about how modernity and its dominant ideals such as individual autonomy, rationality, and self-governance understand and accommodate children and childhood. Liberal theories of self, for example, often exclude children from the realm of the autonomous individual and see them instead as incomplete beings in need of protection and guidance. In his classic work On Liberty, John Stuart Mill famously argued that “over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign” (Mill, 1867, p.6). Yet he was quick to qualify that this sovereignty applied only to adults who had attained full maturity. Children, in Mill’s view, were not yet capable of self-governance and required protection- even from their own actions. He extended this logic to colonized societies and suggested that despotism could be a legitimate form of rule in places considered to be in a childlike state of development and when it was done for progress. In the Indian context, scholars like Ashis Nandy have critically engaged with how the progress of the colonized itself is manifested through the image of the child (Nandy, 1983). According to Nandy, colonialism drew direct parallels between primitivism and childhood through the idea of linear social progress to pathologize both colonized people and children. He distinguishes between two colonial stereotypes: the ‘childlike’ Indian, seen as innocent, ignorant but teachable, loyal, and therefore capable of being reformed through westernization, modernization, or Christianization; and the ‘childish’ Indian, viewed as willfully ignorant, unruly, disloyal, and beyond reform who requires control through strict governance, suppression of dissent, and enforcement of law and order. Whether through reform or repression, the end goal was assimilation into the dominant worldview under the guise of progress and civilization. Such problematic liberal framing of childhood has been integral to various academic disciplines.  

Early engagements with children in disciplines such as psychology, sociology, and anthropology were largely framed through developmental, socialization, and acculturation lenses (Alanen, 1988; James, 2009; James & Prout, 2015; Jenks, 2005). These approaches were later critiqued for portraying children as ‘savage,’ ‘natural,’ ‘universal,’ and always in the process of ‘becoming’ rather than as complete social beings. For instance, developmental psychology views children as biologically driven beings progressing through fixed stages, positioned as marginal figures awaiting entry into the adult social world. Similarly, early sociological thought treated children as future adults or mere successors in social systems, often overlooking them as active participants in the present. Even anthropology, though somewhat more attentive to cultural variation, still often understood children primarily in terms of their progression toward adulthood and emphasized their status as ‘becomings’ rather than recognizing their existing social agency.

There have been important epistemological shifts and growing attention to children’s lived experiences beginning in the 1970s and 1980s- and becoming more prominent in the 1990s- which fundamentally redefined the field of childhood studies and, more specifically, the sociology of childhood (James, 2009; Prout & James, 2015). Broadly known as the social constructionist approach, this perspective challenges the adequacy of standard, universal ideals of childhood in capturing the complex and diverse realities of children’s lives. It repositions the child not as a passive recipient of adult knowledge but as an ontological being in their own right (Jenks, 2005) and places the agentic child at the centre of how we understand childhood (James, 2009). Yet a critical concern remains: how can we meaningfully conceive of children as active participants with voices when dominant imaginations of childhood continue to be deeply adultist and colonial? Like the Kodomono Shiten (The Children’s Point of View) Café in Tokyo, are we truly capable of stepping into a child’s shoes- not merely as a metaphor, but in ways that fundamentally alter how we see, feel, and move through the world? After all, children’s voices are not only about what they express, but also about how the adult social world enables, interprets, and acts upon those expressions.

Another issue is the tension between the liberal conception of the autonomous self and the question of culture. In a short but insightful editorial piece, Nieuwenhuys (2008) lays out the tensions between universal conceptions of children’s rights, particularly as articulated in the UNCRC, and the diverse cultural realities that shape children’s lives across the world. She critiques two dominant ethical frameworks, abstract universalism and cultural relativism. Abstract universalism tends to view children as passive victims whose universal nature transcends cultural context and justifies intervention in practices like child labour or female genital mutilation as morally necessary. In contrast, cultural relativism argues that childhood can only be understood within specific cultural contexts and resists external judgements especially those offered by Western liberal frameworks. Nieuwenhuys argues that both approaches are underpinned by essentialist notions- of either childhood or culture- which ignore the complex ways in which children themselves engage with and reshape these categories. She makes a case for recognizing children as ethical subjects capable of meaningful action. Drawing on a postcolonial framework, Balagopalan (2018) further complicates the debate between universal and culturally specific understandings of childhood. She explores how even discourses celebrating culture through multiple or diverse childhoods are not free from liberal and colonial legacies. In particular, she shows how marginalized children- especially those from working-class or lower-caste backgrounds, were positioned as fundamentally incapable of accessing a universal childhood. Rather than being seen as full subjects within the idealized framework of modern childhood, these children were portrayed by the colonial state as existing outside the threshold of normative childhood, and those needing constant regulation, intervention, or reform.

Spyrou (2018) articulates another critical issue in how we have taken children’s voices for granted in contemporary research. He challenges the dominant tendency within childhood studies to treat children’s voices as transparent and self-evident expressions of their subjectivity. Rather than seeing voice as a direct window into children’s inner worlds, Spyrou calls for a more critical and reflexive approach- one that interrogates the conditions under which these voices are produced, and the interpretive frameworks researchers bring to them. He argues that voice is not merely spoken; it is always shaped through interactional, institutional, and discursive contexts. This includes how children respond to adult authority, the influence of research settings, and broader cultural narratives about childhood. Therefore, researchers have to pay attention not only to what is said, but to how, where, and why it is said- and also to what is left unsaid or unsayable. For instance, in the case of researchers’ interpretation of what children mean, even when children’s voices are presented as if they are ‘speaking for themselves’, researchers inevitably impose some form of analysis- whether through the selection of quotes or the application of theoretical categories. Spyrou asks: do our analytical choices, particularly the widespread focus on agency, inadvertently prioritize children’s creativity and innovation while overlooking how their voices may also reflect broader patterns of social and cultural reproduction?

Another paradox in the discourse on children’s voices lies in how neoliberalism has appropriated and capitalized on children’s lives and agency. Smith (2011) argues that the agentive child promoted by contemporary development discourse often mirrors the ‘self-maximizing entrepreneurial subject’ characteristic of neoliberal regimes. In this framing, children’s autonomy, participation, and competence are celebrated but simultaneously harnessed to serve regimes of surveillance, responsibilization, and self-discipline. Such frameworks shift the burden of inequality onto individuals and cast socioeconomic or cultural disadvantage as a personal failure. This mode of governing childhood continues the older discourse of blaming working-class parents for not ensuring a ‘good’ or normative childhood for their children. Nieuwenhuys(2009) similarly critiques the global development discourse for reifying Indian childhood into a series of fundable ‘problems’ such as child labour or street children. This issue-oriented framing, she argues, does little to disrupt colonial constructions of India as a space lacking a proper notion of childhood. Instead, it marginalizes the everyday experiences of most children and reduces their lives to problems in need of urgent intervention. Even when children are nominally treated as participants or meaningful actors in such interventions, their choices are often pre-scripted within a narrow set of possibilities that align with development agencies’ pre-established visions which in turn reflect a globalized, Western ideal of childhood.

What, then, are we to make of children’s voices and agency? Can they ever be salvaged in some pure, unmediated form or is that itself an unattainable ideal? The agency is always dynamic, relational and socially situated, shaped and constrained by varying contexts of children’s lives.

My own study with migrant children has modestly demonstrated this (see Rajan, 2022). In the backdrop of the discussion above, asserting agency requires more than simply affirming its existence; it calls for interrogating the structures that enable, limit, and even commodify it. Invoking agency must be more than ‘an obligatory act of faith’- it must be approached with deep reflexivity (Nieuwenhuys, 2013; Spyrou, 2011). For researchers, policymakers, and practitioners, this means engaging with children’s lives not as neat expressions of participation or empowerment, but as complex, layered, and at times contradictory experiences embedded in broader social systems. As childhood studies and the sociology of childhood remain a marginal field in the Indian context, there is a need to move these conversations to the centre and thereby insist on the urgency of rethinking children’s voices, agency and childhood itself.

References

Alanen, L. (1988). Rethinking Childhood. Acta Sociologica, 31(1), 53–67.

Balagopalan, S. (2018). Colonial modernity and the ‘child figure’: Reconfiguring the multiplicity in ‘multiple childhoods.’ In T. S. Saraswathi, S. Menon, & A. Madan (Eds.), Childhoods in India: Traditions, Trends, Transformations (South Asia Edition, pp. 23–43). Routledge.

James, A. (2009). Agency. In J. Qvortrup, W. A. Corsaro, & M.-S. Honig (Eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Childhood Studies (pp. 34–45). Palgrave Macmillan.

James, A., & Prout, A. (Eds.). (2015). Constructing and Reconstructing Childhood: Contemporary issues in the sociological study of childhood. Routledge.

Jenks, C. (2005). Childhood. Psychology Press.

Mill, J. S. (1867). On Liberty by John Stuart Mill. Longmans, Green, and Company.

Nandy, A. (1983). The intimate enemy: Loss and recovery of self under colonialism. Oxford University Press.

Nieuwenhuys, O. (2008). Editorial: The ethics of children’s rights. Childhood, 15(1), 4–11.

Nieuwenhuys, O. (2009). Editorial: Is there an Indian childhood? Childhood, 16(2), 147–153.

Nieuwenhuys, O. (2013). Theorizing childhood(s): Why we need postcolonial perspectives. Childhood, 20(1), 3–8.

Rajan, V. (2022). ‘Shed’, ‘shed makkalu’, and differentiated schooling: Narratives from an Indian city. Third World Thematics: A TWQ Journal, 7(1–3), 92–109.

Smith, K. (2011). Producing governable subjects: Images of childhood old and new. Childhood, 19(1), 24–37.

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

Spyrou, S. (2018). The Production of Children’s Voices. In S. Spyrou (Ed.), Disclosing Childhoods: Research and Knowledge Production for a Critical Childhood Studies (pp. 85–115). Palgrave Macmillan UK.

***

Vijitha Rajan is a faculty member at the School of Education, Azim Premji University, Bangalore, India. Before joining the university in 2020, Vijitha was a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Delhi (2015−2020). In 2018 -19, she was a Commonwealth Scholar at the School of Politics and International Studies, University of Leeds, United Kingdom. Her doctoral research is on understanding the educational exclusion of migrant children and foregrounds the discord between mobile childhoods and immobile schools in the Indian context.