Compares responses to the issue of children caring for ill or disabled family members in the 1990s to resistance encountered in the implementation of child labor and education reforms toward the end of the nineteenth century. Discusses parallel ways in which the quality of childhood became problematized without sufficient recognition of the…

Examines children's participation in public life in relation to the tension between control and self-realization found in late modernity. Argues that social tension is created through the conflict between recognition of children as persons in their own right and public policy marked by intensification of control of children creating a view of…