Engaging Children Cross Culturally in the Design of Products

As businesses work to respect, protect, and fulfil the collective rights of all children, it can be easy to overlook the incredible diversity of those we think of as young. Gender, class, age, geography, and other differences structure the lives of the children with whom business seeks to connect. Strategy and product and service development thus need to be responsive to the dynamics of children’s diverse experiences and contexts. This is especially important for those child-facing businesses expanding into different markets across the globe.

Meaningful, cross-cultural engagement with children can give substance to ambitions to localise strategy, products, and services for different markets, potentially increasing their positive impacts on children’s rights. However, even among those enterprises for whom children are the target demographic, the value of child participation in business is frequently underestimated, and it rarely becomes a permanent feature of core business. Indeed, there is a prevailing sense that children’s insights and expertise are ‘nice to have’ but are of limited value when compared with the ‘serious’ contributions of adults. Alternatively, a misconception that child participation entails adults ceding all control over decision-making to children can prompt dismissal of proposals to work with children.

Yet, given space, time, the right support, and a sense that their opinions count, children across cultures can be powerful agents of change. Time and again, I’ve seen first-hand how children from diverse contexts use their participation to imagine a better world and to contribute to their communities and the decision-making that impacts their everyday lives. Over the last decade, collaborating with outstanding child-facing organisations internationally, my team and I have led projects supporting over 5000 children in more than 70 countries to reflect on the impacts of digital technology, violence, climate change, diet and nutrition, play, and mental health^1,2,3,4,5.

These are not small topics. Nor have children’s contributions been trivial. Their insights have led to significant change in policy, education, legislation, professional practice, and children’s lived experiences⁶. Most recently, over 700 children in 27 countries contributed to the drafting of UNCRC General Comment 25 on children’s rights in relation to the digital environment, which provides important guidance for states about how to realise children’s rights in the digital age^1,7. Children greatly value participation opportunities:

“[Being consulted] enriched my experience and knowledge.” (boy, Bulgaria).

“I like that adults are listening to me.” (gender not specified, United Kingdom)

In short, thoughtfully executed, children’s cross-cultural participation can be a game changer.

That said, implementing cross-cultural child participation can be daunting. The bar for ‘good’ child participation is rightly set high. Doing it well requires dedicated resources: time, smarts, and funds. Child participation efforts must be safe, respectful, inclusive, and meaningful for all children who participate. This applies to children’s immediate experiences of participation as well as how businesses activate their insights. And it requires from businesses a sustained commitment to scrutinising their motivations, practices, and impacts on children’s rights.

Consequently, facilitating children’s participation, particularly cross-culturally, has come to be regarded as a specialised expertise, but this should not make private enterprise overly wary of trying it.

There is no single ‘right way’ for children to participate meaningfully in business. Children’s participation ideally responds to specific objectives and circumstances and feels relevant and meaningful to children. As a child participant recently said, “[Effective child participation] actually places children in positions where they feel as though they are doing meaningful work” (girl, Australia). How businesses engage children will inevitably change over time, in response to new insights, shifting priorities, and the growing sophistication of their child participation strategies. The key is to understand what cross-cultural child participation can offer business, to be crystal clear about why your business wants to do it and what participation can offer children, and to be willing to do some hard thinking about what the ethics and pragmatics of child participation could and should look like.

So, what are the different kinds of cross-cultural participation businesses might consider?

Models of Participation

Roger Hart’s ‘ladder of child participation’⁸ distinguishes different child participation approaches and is a tool for businesses to think through how and why they do child participation, and the strengths and limitations of different approaches. Hart’s eight approaches are often distilled into three⁹:

1. Consultative approaches are perhaps the most conventional form of child participation. Generally instigated and steered by adults, these configure children as informants in an intelligence gathering process. Common methods include interviews, focus groups, and surveys. While consultative approaches can elicit children’s insights and experiences, they often focus on ‘hearing children’s voices’ about adult-defined agendas. Children rarely actively contribute to decisions or outcomes. It can be appropriate to use these methods when, for example, limited funds or time constraints prohibit a more collaborative participation process. As with all forms of participation, it is important to manage children’s expectations about how they will participate and what will happen from their participation.

2.Collaborative approaches conceive participation as a process of co-creation between adults and children and frequently draw on co-research and co-design methods. While adults may instigate the process, children are conceived as its co-authors, working alongside adults to identify the challenges, to design and implement the participation methods, to analyse the results, and to channel the resulting insights into processes of change. Effective collaborative participation requires constant attention to how adult- child power dynamics shape interactions in the process.

3. Child-led approaches involve children directing the process from beginning to end. Adults’ role is to ensure children have access to the necessary resources, expertise, and other forms of support to realise their self-defined goals. Child-led approaches seek to empower children to the maximum, relative to their evolving capacities. One potential shortcoming of these approaches is that, rather than modifying adult ways of doing things to make them more child-centred, they can result in parallel child-led processes and outcomes.

With this in mind, below are some strategies to ensure business can do cross-cultural child participation well.