Conceptualizing challenging childhoods: contemporary models and frameworks for addressing vulnerability

This chapter explores the notion of vulnerability in childhood. It presents a genealogy of childhood before exploring the implications of current understandings of developmentalism for two groups often described as vulnerable"”Indigenous children and neurodivergent children. The chapter highlights those aspects of children's lives so often unseen when children are viewed through a myopic developmentalist lens, including community strengths, histories, spiritualism, environments, cultures and politics. Sharon Bessel's 'epistemic inclusiveness' offers an alternative view that instead prioritizes children's perspectives and their lived contexts to fully understand the ways in which children are vulnerable, as well as broadening how we respond.