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This article explores trust in children&rsquo ; s relationships with professionals in the context of safeguarding concerns. With exception, existing research with children about trust in professionals often fails to unpick trust. Using sociological conceptualisations of trust, most often considered in relation to adults, this article unravels this complex concept. It arrives at a conception of trust as socially situated, an attribute of relationships, and a combination of interpretation (knowledge and experience) and faith. This conceptualization of trust is examined in the context of interview accounts from children that were aged 8&ndash ; 10 in an English primary school. Interviews invited their perspectives on three fictional vignettes about peer conflict, domestic abuse, and child sexual abuse. My analysis, although small-scale, argues that focusing on the process of trust in children&rsquo ; s professional relationships and the social, cultural, political, and relational contexts that shape this process, is a lucrative way to gain enhanced understandings of how trust is generated and what facilitates and undermines trust. It sheds light on children&rsquo ; s interpretations of existing relationships and imagined interactions with professionals, revealing the knowledge that they hold and what they do not yet, or cannot know, and how this knowledge (or lack of) influences their trust. This analysis is socially situated attending to children&rsquo ; s biographies, which offers insights that provide good grounds for improving children&rsquo ; s relationships with professionals.

Informed by ethnographic research with children, Davies offers new sociological insights into children's personal relationships, as well as closely examining methodological approaches to researching with children and researching relationships.

This article examines three issues raised by three primary‐aged siblings experiencing a post‐divorce shared parenting arrangement. It argues that the conceptualisation of shared parenting in academic and policy discourse concentrates on parent–child relationships, overlooks children's relationships with siblings and fails to fully recognise the social and material resources necessary for shared parenting arrangements to work. It suggests that current policy discourse takes for granted that shared parenting promotes gender equality for fathers and mothers, despite the existing and ingrained gendered parenting practices produced and maintained in this UK context.

This article presents children's perspectives on contemporary (sur)naming practices. It critically examines naming as a family practice and as a way of 'displaying' family and kinship. Drawing on a study of children's constructions of family and close relationships, it explores whether and how children consider surname as a way of feeling and being visibly connected to others. It suggests that sociological understanding of naming and its significance for kinship would be illuminated by theorizing surnames as an example of fixed and/or negotiated and creative affinities, and as manifestations of experiential and imagined kinship. Showing surname to be personally meaningful to children, I illuminate how children appeal to and reshape assumptions about the family, exposing their engagement with and reinvention of the cultural family imaginary. The article documents shifting forms of contemporary family and kinship relations from the perspectives of children.

Informed consent is a key consideration in ethical research, particularly research conducted with children. Devising an approach to and obtaining informed consent is a complex task involving multiple considerations. The examples used in this paper are derived from a study investigating how children constitute family members and close relationships. The paper is divided into two sections. The first section suggests that researchers should take a reflexive approach to their professional research practice and addresses how a researcher's professional location determines their particular ethical approach. Consideration is given to how the researcher's particular ethical approach can be achieved in consultation with academic thought and research ethics guidelines, which often offer contradictory advice on important ethical issues. The second section of the paper addresses how researchers negotiate their approach to informed consent in particular research contexts which offer challenges to the researcher's thinking about research participants or chosen procedures for obtaining and maintaining that informed consent is upheld. The paper concludes by arguing that the researcher can incorporate academic thought and aspects of the research ethics guidelines in an approach to informed consent that simultaneously values the research participants and the ethical practices operating in the research setting. Such an approach involves careful negotiation and consideration of the interests of all stakeholders in the research process.