One of the key themes to emerge from our previous analysis of kid and adult power was the rise of third parties that provide an economic, legal and political framework for challenging and refining traditional forms of adult power. Children are central within this framework, but beyond providing them with highly regulated channels for communication, there is little sense that they have gained more power. In Chapter 4, we discussed the way that economic and political trends that intercede in generational terms compromised the capacity of some parents to mediate between their children and the outside world. In this chapter, we argue for the importance of mediation as an important conceptual device for refining generational relations and generating interstitial spaces within which adults and children are able to work together. The chapter focuses on family as a social and political context within which children play a mediating role and may exercise kid power, in the positive-sum and intergenerational sense.

Mediation often refers to the capacity of a mediator to intercede in disputes, offering parties a channel of communication through which some form of resolution can be reached. Mediators are drawn on to work through conflicts at a number of levels, including political global resolution, between countries or military forces, and economic disputes between trade unions and employers (Jolobe, 2019). At a more localised level, there have been examples of young children in various countries being trained to mediate in low-level disputes between peers as peer mediators or buddies, for example, by ensuring that there are positive social relations within the playground (Ay Ceviker et al., 2019; Salmivalli et al., 2011). More broadly, mediation refers to an interstitial position between two social institutions or groups of people. A mediator brings these disparate, sometimes warring groups of people together for a particular purpose. As we have argued previously, adults provide an important link between children and the outside world. Parents, in particular, are charged with responsibility for the welfare and wellbeing of children, which includes both introducing children to and shielding them from various external forces (Lightburn, 1992). In a recent paper on parental responses to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Golden and Erdreich (2020) discuss how middle-class Palestinian and Israeli mothers regulate talk about the conflict between themselves and their children.