ABSTRACT
An exchange in the journal Area in the early 1990s suggested that geographic research on children is characterized by diverse ways of knowing that lack intellectual coherence and direction (cf. James 1990; Sibley 1991; Winchester 1991). At the time I argued that this was not necessarily so, and that research on children's geographies had a fairly robust intellectual history spanning at least two decades (Aitken 1994). For the most part this intellectual trajectory followed a scientific discourse with interests ranging from children's spatial knowledge acquisition or wayfinding abilities to their understanding of larger geographic concepts and what Blaut (1991) refers to as the macro-environment.
