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This paper explores the recent plethora of commitments by government to include children in social policy decision making in the UK. The participation of children is located in the tensions between children perceived as competent and/or incompetent that underlies the ambiguities of children's participation. The paper examines the ways participation, power and empowerment can be used in the context of children. The paper looks at children's civic engagement and suggests that the participation of children is difficult with the ways representative governments operate in a liberal democracy today, but ends with some suggested ways forward.Downloaded

This article argues that children's social status and positioning as children needs to be foregrounded in discussions of social citizenship and the re/development of the welfare state against a backdrop of neo-liberal economic and social reform. Set within a theoretical model that highlights the circular and de-centered exercise of power across fields of action, the subject of children's citizenship, understood as a "citizenship habitus" is explored, taking the exemplar of education and migrant children's positioning within schools.

In the 1980s and 1900s there has been a substantial amount of discussion around notions of citizenship. Given the marginal treatment of children in mainstream sociology in the 1980s, it is small wonder that no mention is made of children in these discussions. This article challenges most conceptions of citizenship as they currently stand in their exclusion of children. It adopts a social model of citizenship that emphasizes the ways in which people are connected to each other, rather than being viewed as acting as individualized, autonomous, rational beings separate from each other. The idea that citizenship is conferred upon people according to a system of `rights' and `obligations' should by its very nature assume that people are connected with others in profound ways. Distilling notions of rights, duties and obligations to those of `individuals' elides the crucial importance of human association. If people's associations with others form the starting point of ideas of citizenship, then the location of children within that society becomes less problematic.

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