This project examines the readjustment of child evacuees returning to Finland after the Second World War. The focus will be on the post-war encounters of child experts with these ‘war children' during the 1940s–1950s, but the study also sets out to interpret children's own coping strategies and what might be called their ‘lived experience', which is then juxtaposed with professional (adult) discourses. The project has two main objectives: (1) to shift the emphasis of research on Finnish child evacuees from the war to the post-war period by studying their adjustment to Finnish society during the 1940s and 1950s. (2) To use state-of-the-art theoretical and methodological tools from the history of childhood as well as from the history of child sciences in a new way, in order to provide a more nuanced historical understanding of post-war childhood(s) in Finland, especially from the perspective of the returning child evacuees and child experts who tried to make sense of their problems.

2020

2023