The dissertation assesses how the state is building the relationships with the child as an individual who has rights. It obtains knowledge how children as a social group and as individuals are supported by Lithuanian social policy. The study reveals the construction of one of the main contexts of humanistic pedagogies, when in the analysis of relationships between children and adults children are in the centre. Research aim is to ground theoretically and to asses empirically the meaning of the social-educational contexts of child’s rights and policy in development of understanding of Lithuanian welfare state and to demonstrate it as a paradigm of new knowledge. This is an interdisciplinary qualitative study based on a postmodern paradigm of phenomenology which analyse social educational contexts of child’s policy and rights in the development of Lithuanian welfare state in the first decade of Independence 1990-2001 and compares with six OECD countries: Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Germany and the United Kingdom. The analysis is based on Esping-Andersen's typology of welfare states. The study has reveled that the pattern of Lithuanian welfare regime does not correspond the exact regime in Esping-Andersen's typology of welfare states from the perspective of children's policy. The development of Lithuanian children's policy demonstrates lack of understanding of a child as an individual and creates a weak background for child-oriented social-educational reconstructions. The study has... [to full text]