Children's Geography

Perspectives and Directions

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to systematize the study of children from a geographical viewpoint and to identify new perspectives in children's geography or the geography of children.
From the 1960s to the 1970s, studies of children in geography began with the progress of behavioral geography. Summing up 1960s-1970s findings, the area perceived by children and the action space of children increases as children grow older.
In the 1970s, time geography appeared and some geographers thought that constraints could explain human activities. Children's life space was re-interpreted from the viewpoint of constraints.
From the 1980s to the 1990s, gender and postmodern geography developed. Gender geography's concern with children is that children are born and brought up by women, and that gender roles determined children's spatial activity range. Postmodern geography's concern is with children as "others" and the objection to the image of childhood made by modern society. Gender and postmodern geography's concerns have produced more articles on children's geography than ever before.
Until the 1990s, children's geography explained and interpreted children from an individual perspective. From the 1990s, children's behavior has been explained in relation to their socioeconomic context in geographical studies (a contextual approach).
The future directions of these studies are summarized as follows: 1) more consideration should be given to children's lived experience in places; 2) we should explain children's life space from a socioeconomic context; and 3) we should consider the process of how the image of childhood creates children's life space. It would be especially useful to use an institutional approach.