Introducing Reflections

Abstract

What brings together concepts such as child, families and communities? In this chapter some actual problems in the field related to this heading will be discussed. It has been problematized how children through abstract understandings have been isolated from the social world and its multiplicity of relations. Going up against abstract isolation of development as a solo project calls for conceptual possibilities for analysing developmental conditions and how persons in a concrete way make up conditions to each other. This involves new questions and matters including children’s significance for each other, the shared care between different parties involved in the life course of children and children’s everyday life across contexts. In these introducing reflections I will touch on how these interrelated significances point to conceptualizing the child as a participant in compound and historical social practice. In that way the composition of the three concepts in the heading of this part of the book may offer possibilities for exploring children’s development as an aspect of their participation in everyday activities and situated interplay. The changing theoretical perspectives on ‘child’, ‘families’ and ‘communities’ will be discussed and in the end the following chapters are presented.