Abstract
This paper examines the way in which children's mental health is understood socially, both by professionals and lay people. It examines the institutional differentiation between minors and adults, between lay and scholarly categories, and explores the social processes underlying these categorization operations. It demonstrates that to understand the links between childhood and mental health today, we need a threefold approach that combines the way in which society shapes non-standard behaviour, the evolution of ways of interpreting mental disorders, and the issues, particularly in the family, that guide families in their use of the categories available for thinking about children's problems.
