Child Ind Res (2011) 4:119 DOI 10.

1007/s12187-010-9073-3

Children Growing Up in Poverty and Their Ideas on What Constitutes a Good Life: Childhood Studies in Germany
Sabine Andresen & Susann Fegter

Accepted: 6 May 2010 / Published online: 25 May 2010 # Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010

Abstract This article reports on childhood studies in Germany including two empirical research projects. It concentrates on children living in poverty and on findings regarding how children conceive justice and the good life. Starting with an overview of the state of the art in German childhood studies, it reports the methods and major findings of the World Vision Survey. Although this representative study of 1,600 children clearly confirms the growth of child poverty in Germany, it was unable to show how the children themselves experience their situation. This leads to the second study of 200 really poor children from Hamburg and Berlin. Focusing on how these children define justice and the good life along with what they understand by these terms, it examined how Martha Nussbaums Capability Approach can contribute to progress in childhood studies. Keywords Childhood studies . Perspectives of children . Social inequality . Poverty . The good life . The capability approach . Well-being of children . Martha Nussbaum . Quantitative survey . Ethnographic study

1 A Brief Overview of Childhood Studies in Germany The new social studies of childhood have taken root in Germany, and are being pursued in a variety of approaches. However, interdisciplinary approaches are a rarity, and there is hardly any systematic exchange between sociologically oriented and education-science-oriented childhood studies. One exception is the World Vision Survey (2007), which will be discussed in detail here. Most data on children in Germany come from numerous social reports. A regular, empirically based public
S. Andresen : S. Fegter (*) Bielefeld University, Faculty of Education, POB 100131, 33501 Bielefeld, Germany e-mail: sfegter@uni-bielefeld.de S. Andresen e-mail: sabine.andresen@uni-bielefeld.de

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reporting on children and adolescents has become established alongside the wide range of research on children and adolescents in the social and cultural sciences as well as international and national comparative studies on school achievement. Although these reports were almost exclusively adult- and family-centered for many years, there have been recent improvements in the available data (Nauck 1995; Joos 2001). The German Child and Youth Welfare Act ( 84 SGB VIII) requires every federal government to appoint an expert commission to compile a Kinder und Jugendbericht [Child and Youth Report] in each term of office. These reports deliver up-to-date overviews on the life situation of young people and concentrate on the social problem fields, achievements, tasks, and perspectives of the child and youth services. The 1998 Child and Youth Report was the first to focus exclusively on children and the services available to them, and it revealed the need for social policymakers to discriminate more effectively between children and adolescents. This 10th Child and Youth Report indicated that child poverty is a central and, above all, a growing problem. Currently, there are also other social reports providing findings on child poverty in Germany such as the Federal Governments Family Reports and its Poverty and Wealth Reports. In recent years, there have been some quantitative surveys of elementary-schoolaged children that also view children as the experts on their own lives. Rainer Silbereisen and Jrgen Zinnecker were the pioneers in this field with their Kindersurvey [survey of children] in 1996 (Zinnecker and Silbereisen 1996). Their main focus was on the risks and opportunities involved in the developmental process along with the childrens own perspectives on their cultural environment during this transitional phaseparticularly in relation to the family and school. In 2002, the Deutsche Jugendinstitut [German Youth Institute] launched a childrens panel that started collecting data on children at a markedly younger age (Alt et al. 2004). This longitudinal three-wave study surveyed not only the parents (in particular, the mothers) of children between the ages of 5 and 6, between the ages of 8 and 9, and at the age of 10, but also the children themselves in the final wave. The childrens panel merged both sociological and psychological perspectives. Topics included the potential for interventions and the risks in psychosocial development, protective and risk factors in the growing-up process, contextual conditions that help children to cope with everyday demands, and questions on how children assert their own interests. The LBS-Kinderbarometer [childrens barometer] commissioned by a building society, is a further representative survey studying central life domains of children that is based on surveys of 4th- to 7th-grade school classes in various German federal states. This study concentrated on childrens well-being and life experiences. 2007 saw the publication of the first World Vision Survey that gathered quantitative and qualitative data from 8- to 12-year-old children. The second World Vision Survey is scheduled for publication in June 2010. This new survey has extended the quantitative survey to also include 6- and 7-year-old children. In the World Vision Survey Kinder in Deutschland 2007 (World Vision 2007), their authors decided not just to perform a representative and standardized questionnaire survey of 8- to 11-year-olds, but to carry out qualitative interviews together with a game and extend the sample to include children from the age of 6 years onward. These qualitative interviews asked children about their psychosocial

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and sociospatial networks, permitting a comparison of methods with the findings from the quantitative survey. Based on the questionnaire and a quota sample, the 8to 11-year-old children were surveyed in their homes. The qualitative interviews were also carried out in the childrens homes, and frequently in the childrens own rooms. During the interviews, the children laid out wooden blocks on a carpet to depict which locations were important to them. The researchers gave them wooden dolls with which to populate these locations, and asked them to place these in locations and name them. If they wanted to, they could also raise important persons on little pedestals. This created a more playful interview situation, while simultaneously delivering a representation of the childs sociospatial and psychosocial network. 2 Findings from the World Vision Survey Children in Germany 2007 One central finding of the 2007 World Vision Survey was the impact of poverty in childhood, the accompanying experiences of exclusion, and the aggravating factors of disadvantage in all life domains. However, the survey also examined the childrens well-being. This was defined through three dimensions: 1. The freedoms that parents give their children in daily life (childrearing style) 2. Their well-being at school 3. Their satisfaction with the number of friends they have and the quality of their friendships Questions on the parents childrearing style, the school climate, and the significance of friends were designed to tap the quality of the relationships children experience with both adults and their peers. Results on general well-being (aggregating all three dimensions) were extremely impressive: 59% of these 8- to 11-year-olds felt very good, 29% felt good, and 12% felt bad. There was also a gender difference that has to be approached in a sensitive and differentiated manner: 64% of the girls felt very good compared with only 53% of the boys. In addition, at 14%, there was also a larger group of boys than girls with poor well-being. In Germany, one important factor contributing to the lack of well-being in children is their social origins. More children who did not feel good came from parental homes with low socioeconomic status, basically measured in terms of the educational qualifications of the parents and their available income (parent survey). The percentages were 31% of lower class children versus 15% of lower middle-class children. In many cases, these lower class children shared the experience of poverty and unemployment with their parents, which also helped to shape their childhood worries and anxieties. However, the majority of children reported experiencing a strong level of support from their families, and 85% were either satisfied or very satisfied with the freedoms their parents granted them. This reveals which potentials children may find within their families, and how much parents actually do achieve from their childrens perspective. However, it shows just as clearly how problematic growing up can be when children experience inadequate familial support. The data also revealed how children who did not feel so good in their families depended on special support in

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their schools and nonschool institutions. It was particularly children growing up in poverty who were extremely dependent on this. This indicates a challenge to both teachers and school administrators to see what they can do for all children and, in particular, for those showing massive impairments to well-being. One of the factors addressed in the study was how to increase the involvement of children in school decision-making processes. Experiencing that their opinions are taken seriously was an aspect that brought the majority of children closer to their mothers and fathers. However, only 30% of girls and 23% of boys felt that their class or homeroom teacher valued their opinions. Looking at nonschool institutions such as sports clubs, the researchers found a greater lack of well-being in children who did not belong to such groups or associations. But membership of a sports club has also become a social issue in recent years, because the World Vision Survey showed that it is particularly middle- and upper-class children who seem to profit from sports clubs, whereas children from lower social classes, and girls in particular, have no access to them. There can be no doubt that what children do in their free time and which informal education provisions they are able to take advantage of impacts decisively on their school careers. The study diagnosed three types of leisure-time users: normal leisuretime users, versatile children, and media consumers. Normal leisure-time users made up about one-half of the children with equal numbers of girls and boys. These are children who engage in a variety of activities in their leisure time: They play sports, may well play musical instruments, enjoy meeting their friends, but also watch television regularly. Versatile children have a predominantly middle- or upper-class background and are mostly girls. Through their leisure-time participation in sports, music, intensive reading, creative activities, friendships, and shared games, they acquire educational resources that are also exceptionally beneficial for their education in the school context. This reveals an effective synergy between school demands and the informal education provisions children enjoy during their leisure timewhen access to such provisions is made available to them. The third type of user is characterized by children with lower class origins and is mostly composed of boys. Although these media consumers also enjoy meeting friends and are also interested in sports and toys, they spend most of their leisure-time watching television. This provides no comparable input for school learning. Such findings on the breadth and variety of leisure-time activities and their significance for school learning lead us to ask how educational science can find an appropriate response to this inequality.

3 Children and Poverty in Germany More and more children in Germany are growing up in poverty. According to estimates by the Deutsche Jugendinstitut, the risk of being subject to poverty1
The reformulation of the relative poverty concept from 50% to 60% of the median equivalent income (average net income) has shifted the definition from exposure to poverty toward exposure to the risk of poverty. In contrast, the international discussion talks about severe poverty when people have only 40% of average net income at their disposal (see Mertens 2007).
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among the under-15s has grown by about two thirds between 2000 and 2006 (from 15.7% to 26.3%). This means that, in 2006, every fourth child in Germany was threatened with poverty. Two thirds of these children, in turn, are permanently poor, measured in terms of the fact that they were living in families with an income below the poverty threshold not only in the year of the survey but also in at least two out of the three previous years. Looking at the population as a whole, it is children and adolescents who face the highest poverty risk, and, in addition, no other population group exhibited such a strong increase in the poverty rate between 2000 and 2006 (see Deutsche Jugendinstitut 2009: 8ff). In 2007, UNICEF pointed out that the growth in the number of children subject to poverty since 1990 is larger in Germany than in most other industrialized nations (see UNICEF 20072). The subsequently unbroken negative trend in child poverty in Germany is also associated with the 2005 reform of unemployment benefits known as Hartz IV, which is a fusion of long-term unemployment benefits and public assistance also called Arbeitslosengeld II. For most of the unemployed, this reform has led to a decline in living standards (see Deutsche Jugendinstitut 2009: 15), which, in turn, has a disproportionately high impact on children and adolescents. Data from the Federal Office of Statistics show that even before the Hartz IV reform, both the absolute and the relative number of under-18-year-olds receiving public assistance had been increasing continuously. In 2004, a total of 3.5% of the population were receiving some kind of welfare benefits. However, even then, the proportion of under-18s receiving such benefits was more than twice as high at 7.5%, and for children under the age of 3 years, it was even 11.3%. In other words, the younger children are, the greater their exposure to the risk of poverty and growing up in very constrained circumstances. In 2004, a total of 38.4% of all receivers of public assistance were under the age of 18 (see Deutsche Jugendinstitut 2009: 14ff). Since the introduction of Hartz IV in 2005, the number of people in general and children and adolescents in particular who are subject to poverty has increased even more. According to the Federal Employment Agency, 10.5% of the total population was receiving public assistance benefits in July 2008. The most affected population group, at 16.3%, was children under the age of 15 (see Deutsche Jugendinstitut 2009: 15). According to the Federal Employment Agency again, a total of 1.8 million children under the age of 15 were receiving public assistance (the so-called Hartz IV) in 2008. Nonetheless, the dark figure of poor children is much higher and estimated at 2.8 million. These are the children with a right to assistance who live in households that, for one reason or another, do not claim the benefits they are entitled to (see Deutsche Jugendinstitut 2009: 16). According to data from the Federal Office of Statistics for 2009, the official numbers of children under the age of 15 who are receiving public assistance ranges from 36% in Berlin and 24% in Saxony to 17% in North Rhine-Westphalia and 8% in both Bavaria and Baden-Wuerttemberg. Hence, a major proportion of children in Germany are currently living on a sociocultural subsistence level or even below: Since the introduction of Hartz IV,
2

This study defines relative poverty as less than 50% of average net income.

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welfare organizations and trade unions have pointed out repeatedly that the set rates for children are too low (see, e.g., DPWV 2008). For example, they are insufficient for the educational needs of children and they do not permit a healthy and balanced diet: Only just under 10 Euro are allowed for textbooks, exercise books, notebooks, and lending fees per month; and only about 2.5 Euro per day for food and drink (see Mertens 2007: 4). At the beginning of February 2010, the Federal Constitutional Court also declared the present rates for children to be unconstitutional, because they are not based on real need, but simply on a percentage of the set rates for adults. The general public has also become increasingly aware of this problem over the last few years. Since the publication of the 1998 Child and Youth Services Report, whose findings on child poverty in Germany initially triggered strong political opposition, there have been controversial debates on child poverty and on various strategies to counter it. In many towns and cities, it is often volunteers who are organizing special types of assistance for children and trying to counteract the immediate shortcomings in the provision of basic needs. The following approach to research starts with the childrens perceptions: How do they see the conditions in which they live, and what are their own normative attitudes? We shall start by presenting some important findings on this topic from the World Vision Survey (2007). These will lead us to the approach being applied in the ethnographical study Latitudes of socially disadvantaged children, carried out within the context of the Arche projects for children in the cities of Hamburg and Berlin (Andresen and Fegter 2009). The following findings are significant for an appraisal of the impact of social disadvantage: 1. A childs dependence on social origins can be seen at an early age, and it impacts on self-efficacy, educational aspirations, action potentials, developmental potentials, and academic careers. The latest LBS child study in 2009 has also confirmed that children from families with a migration background and children with unemployed parents more frequently belong to the group of students who report low self-ratings on their competencies at school (see LBS 2009 188f.).3 At present, the study confirms that nonfamilial institutions are providing children living in precarious conditions with hardly any opportunities to compensate for the various deprivations they experience. 2. The social risk factors confronting children living in Germany increase when they have a migration background, when they are living together with a single parent, when they are growing up in the new German states in the east, or when they and their family belong to the lower class.4 This is also confirmed by more recent findings from 2009: Children with a migration background are twice as frequently exposed to unemployment in the family, and children in single-parent families twice as frequently report that their fathers are unemployed (LBS 2009: 31).

The main groups of migrants in Germany come from Turkey, former Yugoslavia, Russia and Greek (World Vision 2007) 4 Based decisively on parents educational background, parents household income and housing conditions, and childrens estimates on the number of books in the home.

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3. In contrast, continuous gainful employment of both parents makes a major contribution to a childs well-being. The LBS child study in 2009 (LBS 2009: 41ff) has also shown that parental unemployment impacts negatively on children not only in their families but also in terms of their well-being at school and within the peer group. A brief sketch of findings on parental unemployment can put this experience of precarious living conditions into numbers that can then be used as a basis for comparisons. In total, 8% of the children surveyed in the World Vision study had one parent who was currently unemployed, and 23% reported that one of their parents had been unemployed for at least 3 months during the previous 2 years. However, when we compare these figures with the situation of children with a migration background, we find that 14% of these children had a currently unemployed parent and 34% a parent who had been unemployed during the last 2 years. Looking at children being raised by single parents, 20% had an unemployed mother or father and 32% had experienced this during the last 2 years; among children living in the new German states, 21% had an unemployed mother or father and as many as 47% had experienced earlier unemployment; and among lower class children, 23% had an unemployed parent and 39% had experienced this in the past. The childrens answers to the questions on justice and fairness give a first impression of normative attitudes. When asked about politics or even politicians, the children showed little interest, partly because 90% of them were convinced that politicians are not interested in them either. However, when asked to say how they think people are treated in Germany, the children gave highly differentiated opinions. When asked whether they felt that children, the aged, people with handicaps, and foreigners are treated fairly, 28% reported that they felt that children are treated unfairly or very unfairly; 31%, the same for the aged; 42%, for people with handicaps; and 46%, for foreigners. Children reporting this perceived injustice were significantly more frequently children with disadvantaged social origins. Their personal experiences of injustice may well differ from those of more privileged children. 4 Capabilities and the Good Life Within the debate on justice theory, it was the American philosopher Judith Shklar (1997) who pointed out the need to assume the existence of a sense of injustice. Her references included Rousseau, who had emphasized that the self-perceived sense of injustice due to ones upbringing may lead one to develop an understanding for the feelings of injustice and injuries of others. For Rousseau, this formed the foundation of political action. This concept of a sense to injustice could offer a more far-reaching approach to negotiate justice and injustice with children. Martha Nussbaum (1999), who had a decisive influence on the design of the Latitudes study (Andresen and Fegter 2009), also considers the ability to empathize with others to be of central significance for human existence. However, she prefers another theoretical framework with a strong but vague conception of the good based on Aristotle, Karl Marx, and the orientation toward the Capability Approach (Albus et al. 2009).

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The Capability Approach with its background in justice theory focuses on peoples opportunities and freedoms to lead their own lives (Unterhalter 2003; Unterhalter and Brighouse 2003; Walker 2004; Andresen et al. 2008). Capabilities are more than the mere possession of certain goods, knowledge of specific cultural techniques, and so forth. They express the actual possibilities of being that individuals are able to choose from for good reasons (see Sen 1985). Hence, research on capabilities as preconditions of well-being does not focus on the concrete well-being itself, but on the possibilities and the freedom to decide for ones own reasons which particular individual conception of well-being one wishes to realize (see Robeyns 2000: 6). In her variant of the Capability Approach, Martha Nussbaum has compiled a list of factors that may serve as the basic conditions for the possibility of shaping ones life according to ones own wishes and needs. As a social philosopher, Nussbaum is not interested exclusively in the justified decisions and activities and the abilities and freedoms required for this; she also explicitly integrates the importance of feelings. Drawing on the Capability Approach, Nussbaum discusses the following substantial freedoms: 1. Life: Being able to live to the end of a human life of normal length 2. Bodily health: Being able to have good health, particularly in terms of adequate nourishment, shelter, reproductive health, and mobility 3. Bodily integrity: Being able to avoid unnecessary pain and experience joy; to move freely from place to place; to have ones bodily boundaries treated as sovereign 4. Senses, imagination, and thought: Being able to use ones senses to imagine, think, and reason 5. Emotions: Being able to have attachments to things and people, to love, to grieve, to experience longing and gratitude 6. Practical reason: Being able to form a conception of the good and engage in critical reflection about planning ones life 7. Affiliation: Being able to live with and toward others; to enter various forms of familial and social relationships and having the social bases of self-respect 8. Other species: Being able to live with concern for and in relation to animals, plants, and the world of nature 9. Play: Being able to laugh, to play, and to enjoy recreational activities 10. Control over ones environment: Being able to live ones own life and not somebody elses; participation, rights, and being able to hold property in terms of real opportunity (Nussbaum 1999; 2000) This list reveals how she is arguing within the Aristotelian tradition that basic human abilities are not innate, and correspondingly require care, the provision of resources, and education. Society has to ensure the availability of the necessary conditions for this and strive to make this availability socially equitable. Moreover, Nussbaum draws on universal ethics in which the central orientations are fixed as (decision-making) freedom, equality, and human dignity. She developed this list over a longer period of time and in several analytical stages. As a result, she extended her originally strong orientation toward Aristotelian philosophy by embedding it within the context of the liberal justice theory of John Rawls (1979). This led her to drop

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any conception of the human good, meaning that Nussbaum accepts that human beings fundamentally have to choose their own conception of the good, and should not have it assigned to them paternalistically. In this context, both Sen and Nussbaum emphasize the importance of consensual negotiation, pointing out that the only way to make normative claims objective is through mutual agreement between moral subjects and the sharing of beliefs. Deneulin (2002: 509) points out here that the list is the outcome of an overlapping consensus, it does not rest on a particular comprehensive theory of the good. However, even though Nussbaum conceives her list as being both open and incomplete, its strongly normative specification of basic conditions has been subject to criticism because it is furnished with universalistic claims. The central criticisms address the phenomenon of paternalism, which is why Sen has emphatically distanced himself from any lists and the perfectionism they imply (Deneulin 2002). Hartley Dean (2009) has also criticized the Capability Approach for not taking systematic account of the reality of human dependencies. If childhood studies want to draw on the Capability Approach, it is essential for them to address these critical points. Despite all criticisms, we still consider this to be a promising framework: Recent studies working with the Capability Approach have led to considerable advances in their fields. For example, in a study of outcome-oriented youth services, Albus et al. (2009) drew on the Capability Approach in order to advance childhood studies, because it offers a perspective combining objective conditions with subjective preferences. Such a theoretical framework that conceptually integrates the two is needed because subjective preferences are always also adaptations to social conditions. A further feature of the Capability Approach is its emphasis on the significance of freedom of decisions and actions. This is emphasized particularly by Amatya Sen, and is of special interest for modern childhood studies because it characterizes a critical perspective on relations between the genders that views them as relationships of inequality (see Alanen 2005). This is why childhood studies also follow a concept of children as active beings who are able to be self-determining as the experts on their own lives and who possess their own specific rights. One expression of this stance is the closeness of modern childhood studies to the childrens rights movement (see Zeiher and Hengst 2005). This, in turn, shifts interest back to Nussbaums vague but strong list, because it negotiates from the perspective of participation and is open to modification should the need arise. It also delivers starting points for childhood studies and the concept of children as active members of society who then necessarily have to be drawn into these negotiations. The Italian child researcher Mario Biggeri also pursues a participation-oriented approach to research. He has used different research designs and combinations to ask children and adolescents to tell him which are the most important opportunities that a child should have in life (Biggeri et al. 2006). Answers were coded on the basis of a capabilities list that Biggeri had already adapted for children from Nussbaums list in 2004, supplementing it with further aspects to cover their needs for love and care (Biggeri 2004). Biggeris very informative findings indicate the importance to children of social relations, participation, freedom, and education. However, despite the innovative nature of his findings and his decisively child-oriented approach to research, Biggeris work fails to exploit the full potential of the Capability Approach

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in terms of a combined subjective and objective assessment of the capabilities for well-being. Any systematic consideration of living conditions and their influence on the preference formation of children and adolescents requires a broadening of the contents of research. At the same time, such studies are necessary not only to verify the relevance of specific potential categories of well-being, but also to relate concrete operationalizations to the world of children. This brings us to the empirical study on the latitudes of socially disadvantaged children (Andresen and Fegter 2009) that applied the principles of modern childhood studies with the goal of operationalizing Nussbaums list to investigate leisure time and relationships.

5 Latitudes of Socially Disadvantaged Children Although the data from the World Vision Survey (2007) demonstrate how childrens perceptions of poverty impact on all areas of life and experience, they do not tell us how the children themselves view their situation or how they deal with it. Therefore Andresen and Fegter decided to take the following approach in their child poverty study on the Latitudes of Socially Disadvantaged Children (Andresen and Fegter 2009). It took the form of an ethnographic study asking about the scopes and action potentials of socially disadvantaged children. It also linked up with Nussbaums capability list by giving the children a questionnaire and asking them to report what they considered to be most important for all children. This was an attempt to focus on their ideas about what constitutes a good life. Andresen and Fegter consider it to be important to integrate children actively into any discussions and research on child poverty, while nonetheless ensuring that we do not subject them to stress or make inappropriate demands on them. Accordingly, their study addressed not only the methodological but also theoretical issue of how research proceeding from the childs perspective can be linked up with an anthropologically based, normative theory of the good life. The study addressed the acquisition and perception of psychosocial and spatial opportunities along with the values of socially disadvantaged children from the age of 6 years onward. The sample contained approximately 200 children aged 6 12 years participating in summer camps organized by the Arche centers in two major German cities: Hamburg and Berlin. Andresen and Fegter have subsumed their research interests under the term latitudes. This term should be understood both literally and metaphorically and it focuses on what the children themselves consider to be their: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. Values and ideas about the good life Decision-making and action scopes Real-life spatial and temporal options Social environment and daily lives Psychosocial conditions Leisure-time options

The choice of the ethnographic approach was inspired by Lareaus (2003) study Unequal Childhoods in which she used ethnographic methods to reconstruct the

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enormous significance of cultural capital for the interplay between family and school. The present study applied the following methods: 1. Participant observation and situational interviews with individual children or small groups during summer camps 2. The camera method and interviews with children aged 613 years (children are given cameras and asked to take photographs of their everyday surroundings; interviews referring to these photographs are then used to build up case reports and reconstruct typical poverty processes from the childs perspective in the socalled mosaic approach, see Clark and Moss 2001) 3. A survey of ideas about a good life in children attending the Arche centers in Hamburg and Berlin using a questionnaire operationalizing the list of capabilities from Martha Nussbaum To formulate the questionnaire in a language to which children can relate Andresen and Fegter followed a procedure applied by the capability researcher Mario Biggeri. During an international childrens congress, he used an unstructured survey to ask youths (but not children) about their ideas on the good life (Biggeri 2004; Biggeri et al. 2006). His findings were clear: The young peoples ideas could be classified exceptionally well to the list, even though they placed a strong emphasis on love and care. Andresen and Fegter did not simply ask the children in their study to tell them about their ideas, but presented them with Nussbaums universalistic and anthropologically founded concept. They were told to rate the items not only in relation to themselves and their personal lives, but to judge the conditions of a good life for all children in general. Therefore the instructions were formulated as follows: We would like to know what you think. How important do you think it is for all children . . . The questionnaire concluded with two open questions: one asking the children if they could name any further capabilities, and the second asking them to name their three most important possessions. The reasons for applying Nussbaums list in this way were based on the following perspectives: 1. From the perspective of the theory of children: To gather first findings on how children evaluate the categories in the list, and also how significant they think they are for all children 2. From the perspective of the theory of justice: To gather first findings on how socially disadvantaged children rate the single categories in the list 3. From a methodological perspective: To assess the utility of a questionnaire in an ethnographic study 4. From the perspective of comparative studies: To perform the important research task of mapping the opportunities to compare different regional and national contexts of growing up

6 The Quality of Relationships as a Framing Condition for Precarious Childhood: Major Findings The questionnaires were filled out by 168 children during their free time at the summer camps, and the return rate was almost 100%. Naturally, the size of the

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sample and the lack of a control group limit the power of any statements. Nonetheless, the research team observed that the children were very interested in answering the questions and enjoyed doing so. Younger children sought help particularly frequently, either from the researchers or from the staff at the center. A total of 55 children answered the unstructured question asking for their own ideas on what would be important for all children to lead a good life. Most frequently, they reported on the importance of the family for children. They particularly emphasized the duties of parents: that they should care for them and help them; that they should rear them properly; that they should listen to their childrens opinions; and that they should not use violence. Several children associated family with the concept of the home, addressing the need for shelter with the German metaphor a roof over ones head. When answering the structured questions, only 1.2% of the children reported that it was not so important or completely unimportant for children to be loved by their parents, whereas 10.2% considered that it was not so important or completely unimportant for children not to be beaten. Andresens and Fegters goal was to perform a systematic assessment of childrens perspectives on a good life; something that has been carried out in only a few studies up to now. They were interested in which conditions and opportunities children consider to be important and as belonging to a good life. When performing such an assessment, it is decisive that the children should not make judgments over themselves and their personal life, but about what are, in principle, the conditions of a good life for all children. This aspect was operationalized in the instructions reported above. Taking this perspective, it was particularly the following aspects that emerged: family and welfare, friends and bodily closeness, nonviolence, school and learning, medical care, pets, and play and vacations. 6.1 Family and Welfare Relationships and, in particular, family relationships are of central importance in childrens lives. The family forms the primary domain for socialization and life. The majority of children surveyed reported that it is important for children to be loved by their parents (98.8%) and for children to have somebody they can really love (97.0%). They also considered it to be very important for children to have somebody who cares for them (96.4%). These results are in line with international findings. In the World Vision Survey (2007), children granted a central status to their family, and children do not see this any differently in Great Britain (Department for Children, School and Families 2008). The above-mentioned research by Biggeri and his team with children from throughout the world also pointed to the importance of this finding. For the children in the Latitudes study, welfare also meant that all children should have enough to eat (98.8%) and that their food should taste good (92.0%). In addition, the majority (93.3%) also considered it to be important for children to have what is right and wrong explained to them. There were also very informative answers to the second unstructured item in the questionnaire asking children What are the three most important things you own? They frequently mentioned not things but other people and members of their own familyonce again revealing the importance assigned to personal relationships.

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By giving priority to the value of good family relations, love, and care, these children from poor families did not differ from other children, as comparisons with international research show (e.g., Biggeri 2004; Biggeri et al. 2006; Department for Children, School and Families 2008). Nonetheless, the results of the 2007 World Vision Survey indicated that children exposed to poverty and social disadvantage experience different and sometimes less positive relationship qualities and general well-being. The Latitudes study showed very clearly that children do not just relate the high value they place on caring relationships to their own parents and families. They clearly emphasized these aspects in their relations to the institution and the staff at the Arche as well. Results from the camera method showed that the children emphasized not only the leisure-time facilities of the Arche and the impulses and opportunities these provided, but also, and in particular, the presence of caring adults and dependable structures. Hence, the childrens need for good relationships does not just refer to their families. This already became clear in the questionnaire survey in which nearly all children (96.4%) agreed with the statement . . . that all children always have somebody who looks after them, even though this item did not limit the need for care to family relationships. 6.2 Friends and Bodily Closeness Alongside the particularly strong significance of family and personal relationships, the surveyed children considered that good friends are also necessary for a good life (98.2%). This also agrees strongly with the above-mentioned British study on childrens well-being in which friends were named as the second-most important component of a good childhood. These children in Britain said that the reason why friends adopt such a central position alongside the family is because they understand you better than your parents, they listen to you and cheer you up, and you can do things together with them well, or simply spend your time with them (Department of Children, School and Family 2008). Being able to feel physically close to somebody and having somebody to cuddle was considered to be important or very important by 87.2% of the children. Nonetheless, this did leave a considerable 12.8% who did not feel this was important, and girls did not differ from boys on this item. A differentiated inspection of the findings revealed a clear relation between gender and whether children feel they can make new friends quickly. Whereas 87.3% of girls reported that they believed they could find new friends quickly, only 74.1% of boys did. There was also a significant difference between boys and girls on the question whether children believed that they frequently have somebody who helps them: 95.4% of girls felt that they get help when they need it compared to only 79.3% of boys. At 20.7%, this left a major portion of boys who felt that they mostly had nobody who helped them. This can be related to findings from the World Vision Survey showing that children from the lower social classes expressed the least satisfaction with their friendships (World Vision 2007: 146). Although children exposed to poverty also seem to consider friendships to be among the most important things children should have, they appear to have less positive experiences with friendships in their own concrete lifeworlds than their privileged peers.

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6.3 Nonviolence For the majority, it was also very important or important that children should not be subject to violence (88.5%). Nonetheless, this still left a sizable proportion (11.5%) who thought this was not very important or even completely unimportant. This shows the need for further research on what relates to this appraisal, and whether children who have experienced violence judge it in a different wayas, for example, the results of the World Vision Survey (2007) suggest. When this study extended violence beyond the childrens family to include their broader social environment, results showed that at least one quarter of the children had experienced either threatened or actual violence outside the family. Results were similar on the question about how important it was that children should not be teased. This was important or very important for 88.5% of the children; only 11.5% thought it was unimportant. This also revealed a clear gender effect: 20.0% of boys said they did not think it mattered whether children were teased or not compared with only 7.3% of girls. The World Vision Survey (2007) found that boys experienced being teased significantly more frequently than girls. This makes it necessary to ask whether some kind of habituation effect is occurring here through which being teased starts to lose its negative connotations. Related to this, 72.5% of the children thought it is important to have a right to be angry sometimes, though this also means that 27.5% did not find this that important. 6.4 School and Learning A large majority of children thought that it is important for children to be able to attend school (90.9%). Alongside the family, school is certainly a very important field of experience for this age group. It is not only as an educational field of learning and experience, but also a childhood lifeworld in which children spend a major part of the daily lives, in which adult reference persons are to be found, and in which children gain both positive and negative experiences through their social contacts with peers. The relatively high agreement on this item may be due to children greatly valuing the opportunities for social contact in the school and/or attributing a high status to school education. Nonetheless, it was interesting to see that school played almost no role at all among the children who were asked to photograph the places that were most important to them and talked about them in subsequent interviews. Current research on childhood confirms that the school is also a source of numerous stress factors. For example, the children in the World Vision Survey reported that poor school grades were one of their greatest fears, and that this fear was as strong as their fear of war. This school stress potential may have been relevant for the 10% of children in the Latitudes sample who did not consider the opportunity to attend school to be so important. School does not just represent education, friends, and well being but also achievement pressure and fear of failure. Looking once again at the findings from the World Vision Survey on satisfaction with school (how much I like school), we see that satisfaction was, once again, lowest in children with lower class origins. Almost one half of the lower class

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children (49%) said that they did not like school very much, compared to between one third and one quarter of the children in other social classes (see World Vision 2007: 139). Hence, although children exposed to poverty and social disadvantage assign a high value to school for all children, they seem to be far less satisfied with their own personal experiences there. Results also showed that it was important for children to have their opinion taken seriously and to be asked to give it (90.9%). However, girls and boys differed here. Girls more frequently thought it was important for children to be asked for their opinion (94.4%) compared with boys (84.2%). Hence, 15.8% of boys were not interested in this. This finding relates to results in the World Vision Survey (2007) indicating that girls more frequently feel that their own opinion is taken seriously. There can be no doubt that this positive feeling of being listened to and experiencing that ones own opinion is important makes a strong contribution to the finding that girls consider it to be generally more important that children are asked for their opinion. Both boys and girls attached a very great importance to being able to make their own decisions on some of the things that affected them (83.9%), but this percentage was comparatively low compared with those for other dimensions of a good life. The Latitudes study paid more attention to this aspect of childrens need for selfdetermination because it has been neglected in earlier studies on childrens well being (e.g., Biggeri 2004; Biggeri et al. 2006; Department for Children, Schools and Families 2008). 6.5 Medical Care The question on medical care comes from international research on childrens well being. Andresen and Fegter did not ask the children when they last went to the doctor, whether they felt that the doctor treated them well and gave them good advice, or whether the visit frightened them. They wanted to know whether children considered that being able to go to the doctor is absolutely essential for a good life. Results showed that 98.1% of girls considered it was very important and 87.7% of boys thought that it was important for children. Further research will have to examine why 12.3% of the boys judged this differently, and whether this related to personal experience, not having learned to care for themselves so well, or to ideas on manliness. 6.6 Pets as Best Friends Answers to the item on how important it is for children to be able to have a pet revealed a very heterogeneous picture with 64.6% of the children finding it important but 35.4% considering it unimportant. Responses were also related to sex here: Boys more frequently thought it was important for children to have a pet (76.8%) than girls did (58.1%), whereas a very high percentage of boys and girls (41.9%) did not find it very important. This contradicts findings in the World Vision Survey (2007) in which the importance of having a pet was much higher in girls than in boys with 21% of the girls wanting to have a pet compared with only 4% of the boys.

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6.7 Play and Vacations The children thought it was important to have the opportunity to get to know other cities and places in Germany or elsewhere (88.9%). Nonetheless, 11.1% did not attach any great importance to this. Having opportunities to play and go on vacation were important for almost all children, with 96.3% considering it was important to have enough time to play; and 96.2%, to have enough space. When it came to having the chance to go on vacation, 99% reported that this is important for children. The very strong importance assigned to vacations has to be viewed in relation to the fact that the children were completing the questionnaires while attending a summer camp. This may well have had a positive influence on their response behavior. Nonetheless, it was still certain that the possibility of rest and relaxation through vacations and play was of central importance in the childrens lives.

7 Conclusion We started off with the finding that being subjected to poverty during childhood has consequences for almost all the life domains and experiential domains of children growing up in Germany. Drawing on the insights from the World Vision Survey (2007), we presented the Latitudes study to show how socially disadvantaged and poor children assess their growing spaces, and which universal ideas they possess regarding a good life. In sum, we can see that categories addressing social relations to family and friends are exceptionally important for the children. It should also be noted that the children do not limit their demand for quality relationships to their families, but extend it to educational institutions and adults in general. Dependable care from adults, the fact that somebody is always there, having basic needs satisfied by adults, but also being offered exciting educational options are of central importance to children. The stigmatizing discussion over the inadequate behavior of parents in socially disadvantaged families once more proves to be inappropriate and incomplete. It is a cause of shame for children who naturally want to protect their parents, and it further exacerbates their exclusion. From our perspective, the childrens need for dependable adults should be viewed as a central task for society. In a study on The state of children in Germany: Policies for children as a way of shaping the future, Hans Bertram has emphasized that parents in advanced service societies can no longer provide a reliable context for their children all by themselves. As long as they continue to be expected to do this, the developmental opportunities of their children and their possibilities of growth will be restricted to their social origins, and one has to conclude that society is simply asking too much of parents (see Bertram 2008). Taking on public responsibility for meeting the needs of socially disadvantaged children is a task that the children themselves point to indirectly when they express their ideas about a good life in the Latitudes study and the locations where they like to spend their time. Proceeding from the World Vision Survey in which we have found some indications on the ideas of justice as well as some statements in the qualitative interviews that point to the childrens ideas on a good life, the second study by

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Andresen and Fegter tries to make the Capability Approach productive for childhood studies. There are limitations to this endeavor, because it confronts children with a predetermined logic and obliges them to respond in line with it. Nonetheless, we consider this to be a viable and productive approach, because children share their world with adolescents and adults. This means that if a universalistic approach claims validity, and simultaneouslyas Nussbaum emphasizeshas to leave negotiations open, then a strict separation between adults and children simply makes no sense. In our opinion, childhood studies should not fall into the trap of a new romanticized topos of the alien child. Any objection to using the Capability Approach with children because children are different is not convincing in our opinion, because it raises the risk of classifying children according to some myth of being completely other. We think it is justifiable to use this approachbased on Nussbaums listbecause findings will either legitimize the capability list or criticize it, and, when necessary, this will lead to its modification or to changes in the weighting of items. A further serious issue is whether Nussbaums list contains middle-class orientations regarding a good life that translate into ideas based on standards that middle-class children meet better as a matter of course. Tanja Betz (2008) has recently shown how research designs based on such implicit norms can contribute to the reproduction of social inequality. We shall continue to control for such risks as closely as possible. We believe that asking socially disadvantaged children about the relevance of Nussbaums list is a first step on the way to using it to analyze intergenerational and inequality-related structures. The next step will be to take this further and survey, for example, the appraisals of socially privileged children. Then we can contrast both sets of findings and relate them to sociostructural preconditions. At the present stage, we believe that analyses of the relations between concepts of a good childhood and processes of generating social inequality represent a particularly strong challenge to childhood studies on the good life and well-being.

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