In this study, Dimitra Hartas analyses contemporary childhood. She discusses the plurality inherent in childhood and the forces that shape children's experience of growing up in the 21st century. She engages with new lines of argument about diversity, difficulty and difference, and critiques the issues that affect children's quality of life such as market-driven values, poverty and civic engagement.

Hartas shows how the right to childhood is being violated in both the developed and the developing world and how our consumerist culture is shaping children's lives in ways that are not always understood, and she advocates the rights to childhoods. She concludes by discussing policy and practice in early childhood education, and examines pedagogies that are responsive to ethics, diversity and difference.

Dimitra Hartas is Associate Professor in the Institute of Education at the University of Warwick, UK. Her research and teaching interests focus on disability issues, children's language development and children's rights.

Introduction \ Part I. Constructions and Positionality of Childhood. Multiplicity, Difference and Enterprise \ 1. The Multiplicity and Positionality of Childhood \ 2. Childhoods of Difference and Diversity \ 3. Children as a Resource. The Rise of the Entrepreneurial Child \ Part II. Ecologies of Childhood in the 21st Century \ 4. Transient Childhoods. The Politics of Change and Uncertainty \ 5. Children's Physical, Social/ Critical and Virtual Spaces \ 6. Children's Happiness and Wellbeing \ Part III. The Right to Childhoods \ 7. Current Frameworks of Children's Rights \ 8. Young People's Voice and Participation \ 9. The Right to Childhoods \ Part IV. Knowledge for Rights and Democracy \ 10. Knowledge and Morality in an Era of Radical Doubt \ 11. Civic and Corporate Education \ 12. Communities of Practice and Learning \ Epilogue \ References \ Appendix \ Index