Inclusion of children's perspectives can be achieved, at varying levels, in each approach (on, with and by) examined here. Although claims to authority around including children's perspectives may appear to hold more credence when children have directly participated in the research, there may be times when this is neither possible nor appropriate. Researchers are challenged to be open and reflexive about ways in which children are engaged with, incorporated in and represented across the many stages of research. Whichever approach is taken, ethical issues and notions of equity remain problematic. This point holds particular resonance for ways in which ethics around children may be considered in National Health Service ethics governance processes.

Focus groups are an important element of qualitative health research, valued for the forms of knowledge and understanding that emerge from interactions among participants. Common advice for focus groups within health research is to limit the level of variation among respondents to generate comprehensive discussion and shared knowledge. In this article, the authors critically examine this advice, proposing instead that it is useful to acknowledge and, at times, consciously build in heterogeneity across categories of those present. The benefit of doing this is that the interaction thus generated can be used as a space within which to explore differing professional positions and interpretations of issues under discussion. Using research they have done, they explore the practical issues involved in getting different health and social care professionals together and go on to discuss the value and significance of using focus groups to explore the production of professional hierarchies and boundaries.

Pediatric genetics is growing in significance as a tool to explain childhood illness and disability. Within both medical sociology and anthropology writers have explored whether investigating genetic inheritance can overemphasize biological connection over other versions of kinship and can also lead to new forms of responsibility being imposed on parents for being "guilty" of sharing problematic "substance" with their offspring. Such considerations are complicated by the fact that a child's genetic variation is not necessarily something they inherited from their parents. This paper explores how questions of inheritance and responsibility are brought into play by pediatric genetics. It does so by drawing on ethnographic research of a genetics service in the UK. In particular we highlight how understandings of kinship can be unsettled by genetic scrutiny, but that once unsettled are not resolved by establishing whether a child has or has not inherited a genetic condition from their parents. Instead existing cultural kinship understandings of the moral substance of kinship responsibility towards producing and raising the right kinds of children are of equal (if not more) importance.

Paediatric genetics is increasingly playing a role in explorations of why a child may not be reaching developmental milestones, while experiencing various health concerns and displaying unusual physical characteristics. The diagnostic processes include close analyses of a child’s body in order to identify ‘clues’ to possible genetic variation. When the genetic variation identified is new and complex there is significant uncertainty about what relationship that variation has to childhood development and what it will mean for a child’s future. This paper, drawing from an ethnographic study of a genetics clinic, explores what versions of childhood difference and normality are produced by genetic explorations marked by uncertainty. The focus is on the significance of visual dynamics within the consultation, in family stories or photographs, and in the images found on websites which catalogue genetic syndromes. Our argument is that inside and outside the clinic the visual interpretations create understandings of the child that at times position him or her as ‘other’, while at other times recognise the child as normal and ‘one of us’. The uncertainty embedded in identifying rare genetic variations enables multiple interpretations to emerge which do not ‘fix’ the child into the category of the ‘genetically other’.

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