Children as capable participants in decisions affecting their lives - how can the child rights perspective be realized by Health-Learning-Safety teams within the welfare sector?

The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child was ratified in Sweden in 1990 but has still not had sufficient impact. By recently making the Convention to a law it has been made clear that children have their own rights. A responsibility now rests on all public sectors to implement the Convention so that it permeates society.

This study focuses on the implementation of the child participation right in an existing collaborative structure called Health-Learning-Safety (HLS) teams.

HSL-teams provides early coordinate efforts to quickly provide vulnerable children and their families with support in order to promote mental wellbeing, and to prevent negative development of the child’s psychological and social health.

Such teams constitute the arena for this study.The aim is to advance knowledge on how to enhance the realization of Convention on the Rights of the Child, and strengthen the child participation right, in multi professional coordinated preventive efforts, obligated to facilitate children’s participation.The project has an abductive and mixed methods approach.

Children, parents, and HLS team professionals will be involved.

Questionnaires, interviews, and group concept mapping will be used to gather information on how child participation is conceptualized and utilized and what main challenges towards effective implementation that may be.

Conventional and directed content analysis will be used, and preliminary results will continuously be discussed with participants in an action research manner.This study will contribute with important knowledge that may be used to enhance efforts to implement the Convention on the Rights of the Child and provide insights regarding barriers and challenges associated with the realization of children’s participation right.