In 1980, Buikstra and Cook stated that child studies were being hindered by poor preservation, lack of recovery and small sample sizes. Nearly 30 years on studies that focus on non-adult skeletal remains in contrasting populations, using a biocultural or bioarchaeological approach, are now more common. But we are still plagued by the same misconceptions and methodological limitations. There are still many challenges ahead before non-adult skeletons are regarded as being just as important as those of adults in providing information about the past. Their analysis provides opportunities for ever new and detailed questions to be addressed. It is an interesting time to be studying children, as more known-age and known-sex samples become available, and ever larger skeletal samples provide a large percentage of non-adult remains. The most notable collections include the known-age and known-sex samples from Christ Church Spitalfields and St Bride's Church in London and from Coimbra in Portugal. In the UK, the cemeteries of St Mary Spital, London and Barton-on-Humber, Bristol have yielded a large number of children and are now becoming more widely available for study. A few known-age children are also present in modern forensic samples, such as the Dart Collection in South Africa, and may provide a means for examining the growth and development of children from different ancestral groups. These endeavours are aided, or reflected, by the recent publication of high-quality texts on juvenile osteology which have increased the number of researchers familiar with their identification and complex skeletal anatomy (Scheuer and Black, 2000, 2004; Baker et al., 2005).