Child agency in family language policy: children's perspectives in Chinese–German families

Children's agency – the capacity to make sense of their environments and initiate change - is central to Family Language Policy yet remains underexplored. This study – part of a larger longitudinal ethnographic project – investigates three Chinese-speaking families in Germany during children's transition to primary school, foregrounding child agency and children's perspectives. Through children's own narratives, the study examines how they position themselves as multilinguals amid family and school expectations and how they perceive their agency within language policies inside and outside the home. To elicit children's perspectives, interviews were combined with participatory methods, including drawing and photographing activities. Findings show that children are highly attuned to their own linguistic competencies and display varied agentive behaviours at home: asserting preferences, evaluating proficiency, engaging in audience design, and at times contesting parental rules. With school entry, children increasingly prefer and use German in family interactions and frequently resist ‘Chinese-only' policies as well as character-learning routines. The results highlight a relationship between schooling ideologies and household practices and argue for systematically incorporating children’s perspectives into FLP research. Methodologically, the study demonstrates the value of participatory approaches with children; analytically, it underscores the need to account explicitly for school effects when theorising child agency and FLP.