Social science research has investigated families, communities, and schools as significant sites of opportunities and inequalities in childhood, with studies highlighting significant resource, experience, and outcome disparities that emerge from the beginning school transition to middle and later childhood and into adolescence. In recent decades, a great deal of interdisciplinary attention has focused on even earlier points in the life course—the first few years of life as a critical baseline for the accumulation of advantages or disadvantages as children grow.  This work has been supported by the advent of large-scale panel survey projects like the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study (ECLS) (https://nces.ed.gov/ecls/) in the US, the British Birth Cohort Study 1970 (https://cls.ucl.ac.uk/cls-studies/1970-british-cohort-study/), the National Educational Panel Survey (NEPS) in Germany (https://www.neps-data.de/Mainpage) and the Longitudinal Study Starting in Infancy in Chile (https://www.unicef.org/chile/media/3181/file). At the same time, smaller-scale intervention projects have provided informative evidence about the long-term causal effects of early childhood environments on adolescent and adult outcomes. Evidence about the importance of early childhood care and education for social and economic development has prompted governments all over the world to reevaluate and reform their preschool systems.

While the focus on early childhood has increased in recent decades, middle and late childhood and adolescence continue to be important points of observation in children’s lives, as resources in the home, school, and community accumulate to support educational performance; as the direct and opportunity costs of continued education grow; and as the optimism and pessimism present in peer networks begin to feature more prominently in the lives and trajectories of youth. 

Against this backdrop, the Chinese Sociological Review (CSR) invites papers for a special issue on “Inequalities and Child Development in Chinese Societies.” Authors are invited to submit papers that consider various aspects of child development outcomes in Chinese societies and how they are shaped by policies, parents/parenting, families, community environments, and pre-primary, primary, and secondary educational institutions.  While papers focused on early, middle, and late childhood and adolescence are all welcome, we particularly encourage papers focused on early childhood, given the dearth of studies on this life-stage in Chinese societies.  We are also interested in studies that adopt a global and comparative perspective or offer multi-disciplinary approaches.  Papers that address one or more of the following topics are particularly welcome:

• Socioeconomic inequalities in child development
• Living arrangements, family care, and child development
• Emerging technologies and child development
• Parenting and child development
• Urban and/or rural contexts of childhood inequality
• Educational institutions, childcare services, and child development
• Community and neighborhood environments and child development
• Climate risk, environmental pollution, and children’s health and development
• Children’s health and nutrition, cognitive and non-cognitive skills development, and their social determinants
• Family disruption and child development
• Social, demographic, and economic policies and child development
• New measurement approaches, new methods, new designs, and new data sources in child development