This is an important textbook that promotes thoughtful engagement with key issues and theories that inform an understanding of childhood development. The purpose of this book is to promote a thoughtful engagement with key issues and theories that inform our understanding of childhood. Readers of this book will enjoy, and be provoked by, a sophisticated analysis of the role and function of childhood in twenty-first century Britain. They will find themselves supported in discovering a discourse for early childhood which they will want to use as a springboard for further enquiry and exploration.There are two intertwined themes that permeate this text: children's sense of self and adult's temporal and cultural fabrications of childhood, and the articulation of these with policy and provision for young children and young children and representation: how they are represented, the sense they make of such representations and their own representational activity. The book intends to turn readers away from our collective tendency to simplify the experiences of young children and replace this with a fuller, more complex, more troubling and more realistic understanding of the social dynamic that constitutes childhood today.