There has been considerable recent interest concerning children in tourism research, with studies arguing that children’s voices have often been neglected (Carpenter, 2015; Poria & Timothy, 2014), particularly in the areas of family tourism (Schänzel, 2010), holiday experiences (Small, 2008) and children as members of host communities (Buzinde & Manuel-Navarrete, 2013; Canosa, Wilson & Graham, 2016). Such debates mirror the discourse around children’s participation in research in other applied fields, although Tourism Studies has been slow to engage. While the absence of children in Tourism Studies may be attributable to the methodological challenges faced by researchers (Khoo-Lattimore, 2015), we suggest that assumptions about children’s competency, along with perceptions about the ethical complexity of involving them, likely pose greater barriers and deterrents. In this research note, we draw attention to the established interdisciplinary field of Childhood Studies (Prout & James, 1990), and a recent major international ethics initiative (Graham, Powell, Taylor, Anderson, & Fitzgerald, 2013), to highlight some of the evidence upon which tourism researchers might build in progressing high quality and ethically sound research involving children.

Prevalent assumptions frame children as immature, vulnerable, incompetent, and hence in need of being gate-kept out of research (Graham et al., 2013). However, this reflects a narrow, developmentally-determined approach to understanding children’s capability and agency that is rarely justified within or across any social or cultural context, since children of the same age can demonstrate remarkably divergent skills, responsibilities, and social and emotional abilities. Over the past 25 years, Childhood Studies has challenged entrenched assumptions about the ways in which children and childhood are constructed, advocating quite explicitly for a competent-child paradigm (Prout & James, 1990).