Child to child relationships in child domestic worker-included households: exploring household power dynamics with and between children

• Child domestic work has been narrowly problematised as labour exploitation only. • Relations between working and employing family children are complex/interdependent. • Child-child relations merge and shift between spaces, times and adult relations. • Children’s agentic acts transform concepts of domestic workers as simply victims. Children’s domestic work, outside of their personal family contexts, has regularly been problematised as an issue of exploitative labour, resulting in a narrow understanding of the diversity of children’s lived experience of such work and impacts into adulthood. Rarely has research focused on the relationships between children who are brought to households to work and the families who employ them. Further, their specific relationships with children of employers have been overlooked. This paper explores the lived experience of both groups, and their intra- and inter-generational relations and emotions within employing households. Drawing primarily on the perspectives of children of employers, triangulated with CDWs’ accounts and the experiences of adults formerly in these relationships in Tanzania, the paper explores how child-child power dynamics shape children’s lived experience in space and time, resulting in a new understanding of children’s identities within complex households. The study exposes far more interwoven relationships within employing households than has so far been understood, including how relative age orders and household time–space contingencies create ambivalent agency among children in African urban households. This has significant implications for policy and practice, which need to take wider account of diverse forms of children’s domestic work circumstances and their interdependent and impactful household relationships.