Who gets to define belonging?

Listening to Children, Families and the Perspectives Between Them

Across our enquiry, we have considered belonging from several different directions. We have explored the places children inhabit, the relationships they form, the identities and experiences they bring with them, and the opportunities they have to participate in and influence the communities of which they are part. Each has given us something to pay closer attention to. But together they raise another, perhaps more fundamental, question: who gets to decide what any of these experiences mean to the child?

It can be tempting to think that belonging is something we can recognise. A child enters confidently, has friends, seeks out familiar adults, contributes ideas or returns repeatedly to a favourite place, and we may understand these as signs that they feel they belong. Conversely, a child who spends time alone, remains at the edge of a group or chooses not to participate may prompt different concerns. These observations can be important, but the meaning we give them belongs, initially, to the adult observing. The behaviour itself cannot tell us everything about how the child experiences it.

This distinction matters because adults hold considerable interpretive power within Early Years settings. We observe children, document their experiences and make judgements about whether they appear settled, secure, engaged or included. Such observations are an important part of understanding and supporting children, but they are still observations made about them. A child may experience an apparently solitary place as somewhere deeply significant, while another may participate readily in the life of a group without experiencing the connection that adults assume accompanies it. What we can see and what an experience means to the child are not necessarily the same thing.

Research that seeks young children's perspectives asks us to view children not simply as the subjects of adult observation, but as capable meaning-makers with knowledge about their own lives. This does not mean that children can, or should be expected to, provide adults with a straightforward account of whether they belong. Belonging itself is an abstract idea, and children's understandings may be communicated in many different ways. It does mean, however, that their perspectives cannot simply be replaced by adult interpretations of their behaviour.

This also complicates the question of what counts as evidence. The experiences and behaviours we notice may all be significant, but none can function as a simple indicator of belonging or unbelonging. Instead, they give us places from which to become curious about the meaning children themselves give to their relationships, environments and experiences.

Different perspectives, different knowledge

A child's experience does not exist only within the nursery. Children move between families, educational settings, friendships, neighbourhoods and other communities, carrying experiences and relationships between them. No single person accompanies the child through all of these worlds. This means that understanding belonging may depend not only upon listening to children themselves, but also upon recognising that the people around them encounter different parts of their lives.

Research examining belonging from the perspectives of young children, parents and Early Years professionals illustrates this particularly well. In one study, although all three groups were concerned with children's belonging, they did not necessarily understand or describe it in the same way. Children spoke particularly about shared activities, friendships and emotional connections with peers, while professionals attended more closely to processes of inclusion and exclusion within the group. Parents brought another perspective again, including what children communicated outside the setting and concerns about children's inclusion within peer relationships.

These differences are important because they suggest that perspective is not simply a question of asking several people the same question to confirm an answer. Each person is looking from a different position. Educators may observe relationships, interactions and patterns of participation across the nursery day that families do not see. Families know the child across contexts and over time, including relationships, experiences and aspects of identity that may be less visible within nursery. Children themselves experience these worlds from within, although what matters to them may not always be what adults expect them to identify as significant.

There may therefore be value in the places where perspectives do not neatly align. An educator may understand a child as well connected within a group, while a family hears something different at home. A family may identify an aspect of a child's life or identity as particularly significant that appears less visible within nursery. A child may draw our attention to a person, place or experience that neither adults nor existing observations had identified as important. Rather than treating these differences as accounts that need to be reconciled into a single version, they may prompt us to look again.

Bringing these perspectives alongside one another may therefore allow us to notice connections, contradictions and absences that would remain invisible from any one position. For our enquiry, this raises an important question: what might we learn when children's, families' and educators' understandings of belonging do not neatly match?

Listening in more than one way

If children's own perspectives are important to understanding belonging, the next challenge is how we make space for those perspectives to emerge. Asking children directly can be valuable, but conversation alone gives us access to only some of what children may want to communicate. Young children differ in their use of language, confidence, communication preferences and willingness to respond to adult questions. What matters to them may also be difficult to express in response to an abstract question such as “What makes you feel that you belong?”

Research with young children has therefore increasingly drawn upon participatory approaches that offer different ways of communicating. The Mosaic Approach, developed by Alison Clark and Peter Moss, brought together methods including observation, conversation, children's photography, tours and mapping, recognising that children's perspectives may become visible through different forms of expression rather than through words alone. Research specifically concerned with children's experiences of belonging has similarly used approaches such as walking interviews and photography, allowing children to move through familiar environments, identify places and experiences that matter to them and talk about these in context.

The significance of these approaches is not simply that they make research more engaging for young children. They can change what adults are able to notice. A photograph, walk, drawing or observation may draw attention towards a person, place or experience that would never have emerged from a predetermined question, creating opportunities to explore its significance with the child.

Using different approaches also matters because there should not be one preferred way of demonstrating a perspective. If our enquiry relies predominantly upon spoken answers, the children most comfortable with adult conversation may inevitably become the easiest to hear. Listening more broadly means remaining attentive to gesture, movement, play, expression, proximity, repetition and refusal, as well as children's words, photographs and drawings. It also means recognising that different approaches may work for different children and that a child may communicate something significant without responding to the question an adult thought they were asking.

For our enquiry, then, the aim is not to find the single best way to ask children about belonging, but to create different opportunities for children to draw our attention towards what matters to them. But this introduces another difficulty. Giving children different ways to communicate does not remove the adult from the process. Adults still decide what to notice, what to record and, ultimately, what they think children's words, actions, photographs and drawings mean.

From listening to interpretation

Creating different opportunities for children to communicate does not mean that the meaning of what they communicate will always be clear. A photograph, drawing, gesture or repeated action may draw our attention towards something significant, but it cannot necessarily tell us why. A child who repeatedly photographs the same place, for example, may value it for reasons an adult would never anticipate. What children show us gives us something to become curious about; it does not, by itself, provide the explanation.

This distinction is particularly important when investigating belonging. If we begin with a picture of what belonging ought to look like, there is a risk that children's words and actions become evidence for categories adults have already created: sociability becomes connection, participation becomes inclusion or withdrawal becomes unbelonging. Yet none of these relationships can simply be assumed.

For our research, this makes the distinction between recording and interpreting particularly important. We can record what a child says, photographs or does without immediately deciding what it demonstrates. Where possible, we can return to children themselves and ask about what they have shown us, while also looking for patterns across time and different forms of communication. Our first interpretation may not be the child's.

This does not mean that adults should stop interpreting. Interpretation is unavoidable, and educators' knowledge of children, families' perspectives and the wider research literature all have something valuable to contribute. The challenge is to keep those interpretations visible as interpretations rather than allowing them to become facts about the child's experience. Bringing different pieces of evidence and different perspectives alongside one another may deepen our understanding, but it may also leave questions unresolved. Uncertainty is not necessarily a weakness in an enquiry of this kind.

Across our literature review, we have found many places from which to begin looking. Place has encouraged us to ask which spaces matter to children and why. Relationships has made us curious about who matters to them and what those relationships mean. Identity and culture have led us to ask which aspects of themselves and their lives children consider significant. Voice, agency and inclusion have encouraged us to look at where children can participate, contribute and influence what happens. What none of these can do is tell us, from the outside, what significance those experiences hold for an individual child.

Perhaps, then, the next stage of our enquiry is not about becoming better at deciding whether children belong. It is about becoming better at listening to what belonging might mean within their lives. The literature has given us places to look and questions to explore, but it cannot tell us what we will find within our own community.

That is now for the children to begin to show us.