A reflection on early childhood experiences in a global context, both before and after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.

In this volume, contributors from across the globe provide examples of local childhoods from different national contexts including the United States, Australia, Finland, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Japan, Norway, and Sweden. Each chapter presents a different focus on early childhood, showing the diversity and complexity across multiple countries. Key topics explored include multi-language development, nationalism, and multiculturalism. Across the chapters, concepts around cultural theories of everyday life show how practices of and concerning children function to produce childhood as an artifact, fiction, and instrument.

The COVID-19 pandemic has demanded major changes around learning, agency, voice, and lived experience for children around the world, and this book aids readers in understanding how changing perspectives on children and childhood and identity are expressed among children, families, and educators in and outside educational environments. It brings together active researchers in the field of global childhoods to sustain and develop our community of research and scholarship, promoting internationalization through global childhoods as a way of cultural diversity and acceptance. It will be a useful resource for students and academics in early childhood education and education studies more generally, as well as practitioners and educators.