Tween democracy: A qualitative analysis of Nordic 9–12-year-olds’ perspectives on how the world should be run

(Publisert i Citizenship teaching & learning, vol. 20 (April 2025))

This article adds to the debate about children’s engagement in political and social action. To explore this, we created educational workshops in Norway and Finland in 2023, in which 35 children, aged 9–12, were asked to imagine, in groups of four to five participants, a new planet for the arrival of Earth’s inhabitants and discuss laws for such a utopian society. Afterwards, the children were presented with dilemmas on various political and social issues with the aim of facilitating a discussion among them to increase perspective-taking and to get a deeper grasp of their views. The workshops were conducted on two different Saturdays in a non-school setting with free meals; we aimed to reach out to children from various backgrounds. The informal setting allowed children from different schools to meet and reduced expectations of conforming to class standards. Our findings show that children under twelve years of age articulate many and different perspectives on how the world should be run. Still, they see their own limitations as children to influence policies and decision-making processes. Further studies would benefit from exploring these findings more closely.