This study addresses the relationship between children's participation and the protection and provision offered to them by social services in Sweden. It applies a theoretical framework for analysing child welfare that is anchored in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. How child participation may affect child protection and provision is examined empirically using case documentation from 2 municipalities. The main finding is that when children are not given voice or opportunity to influence the framing of what “the problem” is, the design of protection and care tends to be poorly matched to the actual problems documented in the child investigation and vice versa; when children can influence framing, this is associated with well‐matched protection and care. This suggests that traditional child welfare ethos, to the effect that protection should be of such overriding concern that children even should be protected from participation, is misguided. The study further illustrates the intrinsic problems with the family orientation of Swedish social services and its reliance on partnership with parents, which makes it difficult to live up to the Convention on the Rights of the Child. Incorporating child participation into existing service models can transform Swedish social services to an augmented child‐focused system that by ensuring participation also promotes protection and provision.

Background: Intra-articular hyaluronic acid represents a substantive addition to the therapeutic armamentarium in knee osteoarthritis. We examined the effect of dietary supplementation with a natural extract of chicken combs with a high content of hyaluronic acid (60%) (Hyal-Joint ® ) (active test product, AP) on pain and quality of life in subjects with osteoarthritis of the knee.

The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) formulates the rights of children in terms of provision, protection and participation. CRC implies a multi-dimensional view of children's welfare, including agency. This enables us to rethink the way we research and design policies aimed at promoting child welfare. In the past, Sweden has been seen as a forerunner when it comes to children's rights. However, the weak imprint of CRC on Swedish legislation and CRC implementation is not only a puzzle but also this apparent lack of impact makes it an interesting test case for exploring post-CRC policy developments. The purpose of the study is to identify what has prevented the evolution of Swedish social policy in this domain. We propose a framework for analysing policies aimed at promoting children's welfare (child policy) that goes beyond ‘family policy’. This, we argue, is critical for identifying obstacles to such a policy evolution. The framework is normatively anchored in CRC and theoretically inspired by the notion of participatory rights. By examining the legal reform work in Sweden over the past three decades with regard to how children's right to voice is treated in three areas of social service delivery, we observe that the lawmaker recognises parents’ rather than children's participatory rights. The lack of recognition of children's agency implies that a reconceptualisation of child welfare is necessary in order to unlock the stalemate in child policy development in Sweden, as well as to dissolve the tension between children as ‘beings’ and ‘becomings’.

Shared, or alternating, residence for children when their parents separate is increasingly common. Sweden adopted a new policy in 1998 (modified in 2006) which gave courts the mandate to order 50/50 alternating residence against the will of one parent. Since then, the 50/50 alternating residence has become the legal norm in Sweden in cases of disputed custody. In this article, we ask how Swedish policymakers reasoned in relation to the potentially conflicting values of equal parenting post‐separation and the interests of children. More specifically, we investigate how they addressed some of the most common objections to court‐ordered alternating residence. We found that all three issues were discussed extensively during the policy‐making process, but that, in the end, none of them was seen as contradictory to the goal of promoting more equal parenting roles post‐separation through the introduction of court‐ordered alternating residence. This policy outcome, we argue, should be seen in light of Sweden's long‐standing commitment to strengthening the role of fathers in the care of children.

The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child has created momentum for the notion of child policy to be advanced. The article elaborates a taxonomy of child policies for analyzing policy instruments aimed at promoting various aspects of children’s welfare, and four different types of child policies are identified. The article explores the feasibility of this conceptual framework with a case study of Sweden. We frame the move toward child-centered policies in terms of defamilization: such policies may enhance “freedom as non-domination” and could be seen as the second round of the defamilization of social policy.