Introduction

In recent theorising about childhood both regulation and agency are said to be greater now than in the past. Some writers have emphasised how much of children's lives is controlled, yet others – and sometimes the same people – also stress that children have choice and influence over their own environments and development. The apparent paradox derives in part from attention to different timescales and domains, as children are more constrained in some contexts than others. Taking a long-term perspective, childhood is now seen as more regulated than in the past, especially through the creation of schools and, more recently, preschool and leisure institutions (Hendrick, 1997; James et al, 1998; Prout, 2001), although arguably there has also been a limited trend to encourage children's individual choices and collective participation through such measures as school councils (Alderson, 2000). During the last 50 years, such trends as the growth in road traffic and loosening of community ties are seen to have increased parental control of children's space outside the home (Hillman, 1993). Yet within the (western) home, relations are generally thought to have become more democratic in recent times (Mayall, 1994; Dahlberg, 1996; Mayall, 2002). In a postmodern context, children are seen as having to manage greater change and diversity than in previous eras, while also having greater scope for influencing many aspects of their own upbringing, since adults are less able than formerly to impose their own definitions and models (du Bois-Reymond et al, 1993). Young people are, it is argued, less constrained by ascribed roles and socioeconomic determinants of life paths, so they are more able and more inclined to create their own individual biographies (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 2001).

The notion of boundary is highly relevant to these trends, as a concept that helps illuminate the extent and limits of children's own choices with respect to relationships and space and a means of describing a key feature of parental control of children. Boundary is not a term used explicitly from children's own accounts of their lives, but is a helpful way of considering the ways in which they manage key relationships and spaces in their lives.