In this article we discuss chronic disease and its impacts upon childhood. We discuss the experience of providing play activities for hospitalized children as a strategy to ensure their freedom to make choices and to question values. We discuss the notion of socialization as being different from sociability. We discuss the interactionist perspective of Child Sociology and discuss conceptually the use of play activities as a tool for humanizing relations. We conclude that there is a need for further investigations approaching children as subjects of expression and point to the potential of play as an instrument of humanization.
Childhood; Chronic disease; Humanization; Child sociology
