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What are the life experiences of farm children in rural southwestern Ontario? Within the rural sociological literature, little research has been undertaken on the geographies of Canadian children in rural settings. Play, leisure, work and future aspirations are important to their lives. However, little is known about these issues and children's use of space and place on the farm. This study focuses on these issues from the point of view of the child and examines how gender, age and socialization processes work together with agrarianism to frame the lifeworlds of these children. In general, these children do not aspire to farm in the future, but are interested in future residence in the country. They value the way of life to be found in farming but some experience loneliness on the farm. For farm children, space and farm animals act as comfort in their lives and make for unique experiences.

What can one expect to unfold when they choose to do a faceto-face study of children on the farm and their use of space in rural southwestern Ontario? The process of getting the research off the ground from an ethics point of view was one where it was anything but normative, and to a large extent, a grueling process. This article situates the researcher_s dilemma and lays out the unfolding of the research process with reference to the TriCouncil Policy Statement on Ethical Conduct for Research Involving Humans and the major components found to trouble a research ethics board on a university campus. Last, academic freedom and the rights of researchers are considered in the context of undertaking the proposed research agenda.KEY WORDS: academic freedom, ethics review process, research with children What would it be like to undertake a study on the meaning of farm life for farm children, their use of space and place on the farm? After research on farm men and women in their attachments to the land had been undertaken, the foregoing question raised itself time and time again. It did so because on numerous occasions the farm men and women whom I was studying suggested that they did not want their children to farm. The reasons given were that the farm was a place of unremitting work, yielding poor financial returns (Cummins, 1996).With this idea in mind, I went to the sociological literature on farming and agriculture to see what research had been done on farm children. I realized that I was onto an interesting new topic which combines sociology and human geography. It is what Matthews et al. (2000: 142) call part of the Bhidden geographies^and this largely unresearched area is known also as an Bemerging geography.^Matthews et al. (2000: 141) suggest that geographers have important contributions to make to this developing discourse, especially in relation to how the contingency of place impacts on the nature of children_s lives. The work of researchers such as Holloway

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