The idea for the book arose from my many years of experience and studies with children in Latin America and Africa. My first significant experience was in the 1980s in a camp of Salvadorian refugees in Honduras and in a rural region of Nicaragua, where a cruel civil war was underway. There I experienced children who had to endure unimaginable suffering and fought for their survival in a way that astonished me, often on their own. These experiences turned a lot of what I thought I knew about children upside down. My thoughts about children of the Global South, especially those living in extreme poverty, were soon put to the test again, when I found an opportunity to volunteer for a ‘social brigade’ (as it was then called) to accompany children on the streets and markets of the Nicaraguan capital Managua (and other cities in the country). Here the children provided for their livelihoods and in some cases also for their families. I kept wondering where these children found the strength to cope with such oppressive living conditions without losing courage and even humour.

I began to understand that the children often drew their strength from taking care of themselves and others and taking responsibility, and – which I consider decisive – found recognition in their environment. Observing that the children often supported each other, together with my colleagues who tried to support the children, we came up with the idea of promoting the children's self-organization. I was familiar with this idea from the social movements of school and university students and young workers, who have rebelled in Germany and other countries since the late 1960s against authoritarian control and fought for a freer and self-determined life. Nevertheless, the idea of self-organization gained a new meaning in many respects in view of the living conditions of the children I was dealing with. It was not only about freedom and self-determination, but also, to a much greater extent, about social equality and justice. In Nicaragua and – as I have experienced since the 1990s – in other regions of the Global South, the idea of self-organization manifested itself in various social movements of young people against discrimination, disregard, poverty, exploitation and war and for a peaceful and secure life in which their human dignity is protected.