The article examines how migrant children in Sweden are fostered to become 'Swedish' in a preschool setting aiming to integrate them and their families into the Swedish society. The analysis, where Bernstein's (1971Bernstein's ( , 2000 concepts of classification, framing, and reconceptualization are used, shows how the children are fostered against a background of everyday nationalism, produced in preschool curriculum, recontextualized in the talk of the educators and reproduced in everyday routines in the preschool setting. The analysis also shows how the image of the rich and competent child, emphasized in Swedish policy documents and the national child centred pedagogy, does not apply to children constructed as the 'other'. Instead, a controlled pedagogy aiming to compensate for something perceived as lacking in the children is legitimized.

The focus for this article is child poverty in a Nordic welfare state context. With data from two qualitative studies from Sweden and Norway, we discuss child poverty from the children's point of view, in the framework of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, articles 27 and 28. In article 27, food, housing and clothing are mentioned as particularly important for an adequate standard of living. In poverty studies where children's voices are being heard there has been little focus on these necessities. We find that a few of the children living with economic hardship experience a lack of necessities such as food, housing and clothing. We also explore whether children experience limited possibilities in relation to education. Despite of the state policies recognition of equal opportunities in relation to schooling, we find differences due to economy. In some cases this leads to young people dropping out of school to work. Overall we find that children take responsibility in relation to their families' financial situation. In the final discussion we pay attention to the powerlessness of the children's situation between the parents and the states' responsibilities for providing for the children's basic needs. We argue for the need for a discussion about the children's position between rights and protection. If poor children are loaded with more responsibilities than their peers from better-off families, it will add to the burden of worry and distress in an already complicated situation.

The article explores how children use different types of knowledge of place to make sense of their relations to other children. The participants are children aged 11–12 in a small town in southern Sweden. The methodology used is place mapping with group interviews. A significant outcome is that the children connect emplaced and spatial knowledge in their efforts to understand themselves and others. Their emplaced knowledge is thus not separated from the spatial knowledge. Another significant result is that the participating children are engaged in an exchange of knowledge of place with other children and with adults.

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In the Nordic countries, there is a culturally rooted understanding of nature as a ‘good’ place for children. The aim of the article is to deconstruct this understanding by exploring how different mobile preschools – buses that bring children to different places on a daily basis – relate to nature spaces and children’s learning and well-being in them. Based on critical theorization of place and the nature/culture divide, we argue that, while there exists an idealization of nature within the mobile preschool tradition, the ways that nature is viewed as ‘good’ for children differ depending on the children’s ethnic background and residential area. The results show that compensatory ideas are especially vivid when it comes to migrant children who live in multi-ethnic neighbourhoods. Education in nature, aiming at freedom and agency, brought forward in the preschool curriculum in the Nordic countries, seems more reserved for children who already have the right kind of cultural background and language. The ‘other’ children, however, are more likely to receive an education aiming to compensate for something perceived as missing – that is, the ‘right’ kind of capital regarding ‘nature’.