Creating child-inclusive societies.

In a global landscape defined by polycrisis, children are being failed. To address this failure, we ask an ambitious yet fundamental question: how do we create child-inclusive societies where every child thrives and has the best start in life, where intergenerational disadvantage is redressed, and where child poverty is ended? Building on the power of the social determinants of health in advancing equity and human wellbeing, we argue that child inclusiveness requires three foundational actions linked to the political, commercial, and social determinants of health: (1) prioritising implementation of transformative collaboration between policy makers, public bodies, and communities to improve outcomes for children; (2) reclaiming the public good through child-centred regulatory frameworks that aim to deliver health care and improve wellbeing; and (3) valuing the time to care for children and to build meaningful and responsive relationships with them. With innovative thinking about our societies and their core values, we can design child-inclusive interventions and derive relevant metrics and indicators to track progress.

How child inclusive were Australia's responses to COVID-19?

From March 2020, Australia introduced a range of policies to respond to COVID-19, most of which impacted significantly on the lives of children. This article applies a child-centred framework, developed from rights-based participatory research with children, to analyse how children have been represented in policy narratives around COVID-19 and the extent to which policy responses have been child-inclusive or child-centred. We argue that, overall, COVID-19 policy responses have failed to be child-inclusive or child-centred.

Dominant discourses, debates and silences on child labour in Africa and Asia.

Drawing on the relevant literature, this article explores key debates and controversies on child labour in the context of Africa and Asia. It first identifies and analyses three dominant discourses on child labour: 1) the work-free childhoods perspective; 2) the socio-cultural perspective; and 3) the political economy perspective. Against the backdrop of these discourses, the article goes on to critically examine aspects of child labour that are underrepresented in the literature and in international policy circles.