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Achievement-Related Motives in Children
Charles P. Smith
Russell Sage Foundation, 1969
Examines the conditions under which motives to achieve are fostered in children. The papers included in this volume reflect the major traditions of research in the field and bring together a set of studies for achieving a better understanding of the ways in which achievement-related personality characteristics develop and function in evaluative or competitive situations.
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After-School Clubs for Kids
Thematic Programming to Encourage Reading
Lisa M. Shaia
American Library Association, 2014

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Alaska on the Go
Exploring the 49th State with Children
Erin Kirkland
University of Alaska Press, 2014
Nearly two million people visit Alaska every year, drawn to its spectacular views and endless activities. But with such size and so many options, it can seem overwhelming when it comes to planning a family vacation to the 49th state. The best place to start? With a local, of course.

Journalist and Alaska resident Erin Kirkland knows every corner of the state, and she has crossed thousands of miles with her son. In Alaska on the Go, she offers a fresh take on exploring some of the most beautiful land in the world, with tips and tricks that only an insider knows. Serving as the perfect tour guide, Kirkland identifies the best and most kid-friendly destinations in cities across Alaska. She offers practical advice on everything from restaurants to rest stops and from weather surprises to wild animals. Photos, maps, and sample itineraries make it easy for parents to plan a trip that will delight and entertain everyone.

The only family travel guide to Alaska written by a current Alaskan, Alaska on the Go makes the state more accessible than ever. Whether traveling via car, cruise ship, or dogsled, this practical, portable guide will open up a new world of memorable adventures.
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Alaska on the Go
Exploring the Alaska Marine Highway System with Children
Erin Kirkland
University of Alaska Press, 2017
Every year, nearly two million tourists visit Alaska, and at least half of them spend time exploring the state’s waterways. For families that want to do so in a more independent fashion than a cruise ship or guided tour would allow, Erin Kirkland has written the perfect guide to navigating the state’s unique ferry system.
 
A staple of coastal transportation since the 1950s, the Alaska Marine Highway System is a vital link to cities that are often inaccessible except by air. Alaska on the Go offers fascinating accounts of both the small coastal towns and the larger population centers serviced by the highway along with easy-to-navigate route descriptions, helpful packing lists, and tips for inland and onboard adventures. Portable and personable, and covering all thirty routes that make up the Alaska Marine Highway System, Alaska on the Go is the perfect companion for the intrepid traveler.
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Allies and Obstacles
Disability Activism and Parents of Children with Disabilities
Allison C. Carey, Pamela Block, and Richard K. Scotch
Temple University Press, 2020

Parents of children with disabilities often situate their activism as a means of improving the world for their child. However, some disabled activists perceive parental activism as working against the independence and dignity of people with disabilities. This thorny relationship is at the heart of the groundbreaking Allies and Obstacles.

The authors chronicle parents’ path-breaking advocacy in arenas such as the right to education and to liberty via deinstitutionalization as well as how they engaged in legal and political advocacy. Allies and Obstacles provides a macro analysis of parent activism using a social movement perspective to reveal and analyze the complex—and often tense—relationship of parents to disability rights organizations and activism. 

The authors look at organizational and individual narratives using four case studies that focus on intellectual disability, psychiatric diagnoses, autism, and a broad range of physical disabilities including cerebral palsy and muscular dystrophy. These cases explore the specific ways in which activism developed among parents and people with disabilities, as well as the points of alliance and the key points of contestation. Ultimately, Allies and Obstacles develops new insights into disability activism, policy, and the family.

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ALSC's Popular Picks for Young Readers
Diane Foote
American Library Association, 2014

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‘Am I Less British?’
Racism, Belonging, and the Children of Refugees and Immigrants in North London
Dogus Simsek
University College London, 2024
An insightful study into contemporary identity formation and the sense of belonging of children of immigrants from Turkey, through an ethnography of their lives in North London.

‘Am I Less British?’ focuses on the children of refugees and immigrants from Turkey in North London. Providing a rich ethnography of the lives of the children, the book studies their sense of identity and belonging, and their transnational experiences. It aims to understand how the children position themselves within a range of locations (London, North London, and Turkey), where they face class hierarchy, racism, and discrimination. Dogus Simsek explores how these children think about their sense of belonging within the contemporary political context in Britain and Turkey. De-identifying themselves from national identities and holding onto their oppressed identities appear as new forms of resistance in response to racism and exclusion.

The experiences of the young people reflect the complexity of their lives in changing political and social circumstances across the borders of nation-states, as well as the importance of other categories of identity, including local identities. Overall, the book argues that the intersections of local, national, and transnational approaches, the political context through which the lives of young people are framed, and their sophisticated engagement with ideas of race, class, ethnicity, and gender, are crucial to understanding their identity formation.
 
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Ambivalent Childhoods
Speculative Futures and the Psychic Life of the Child
Jacob Breslow
University of Minnesota Press, 2021

Explores childhood in relation to blackness, transfeminism, queerness, and deportability to interrogate what “the child” makes possible

The concept of childhood contains many contested and ambivalent meanings that have extraordinary implications, particularly for those staking their claim for belonging and justice on the wish for inclusion within it. In Ambivalent Childhoods, Jacob Breslow examines contemporary U.S. social justice movements (including Black Lives Matter, transfeminism, queer youth activism, and antideportation movements) to discover and reveal how childhood operates within and against them.

Ambivalent Childhoods brings together critical race, trans, feminist, queer, critical migration, and psychoanalytic theories to explore the role of childhood in shaping and challenging the disposability of young black life, the steadfastness of the gender binary, the queer life of children’s desires, and the precarious status of migrants. Through an engagement with“the psychic life of the child” that combines theoretical discussions of childhood, blackness, transfeminism, and deportability with critical readings of films, narrative, images, and social justice movements, Breslow demonstrates how childhood requires sustained attention as a complex and ambivalent site for contesting the workings of power, not only for the young. 

Ambivalent Childhoods is a forward-thinking and intersectional analysis of how childhood affects activism, national belonging, and the violence directed against queer, trans, and racialized people. 

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America Lost and Found
An English Boy's Wartime Adventure in the New World
Anthony Bailey
University of Chicago Press, 2000
In 1940 seven-year-old Tony Bailey was evacuated to the United States—one of more than 16,000 children sent overseas at a time when a Nazi invasion of England seemed inevitable. He spent four years with the wealthy Spaeth family in Dayton, Ohio, before returning to his parents in Southampton. Evocative, heartfelt, and charming, this is a story of a double childhood—of a boy who became American while never ceasing to be British.

"An original, sensitively told story in which the perspectives of the child are carefully remembered. . . . Bailey's book speaks, with gentle eloquence, not only to those who remember being boys, but to everyone who would seek to protect children from the hurts and ravagings that ordinary life can inflict, to say nothing of war." —Richard Montague, Newsday

"No doubt Tony Bailey owed America something for its hospitality during those anxious years, and with this book he has amply repaid the debt." —Joseph McLellan, Washington Post

"An exquisitely controlled, quietly amusing and moving story." —Publishers Weekly

"As tender as it is truthful, and as amusing as it is unpretentious." —John Russell, New York Times Book Review
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The American Child
A Cultural Studies Reader
Levander, Caroline F
Rutgers University Press, 2003
From the time that the infant colonies broke away from the parent country to the present day, narratives of U.S. national identity are persistently configured in the language of childhood and family. In The American Child: A Cultural Studies Reader, contributors address matters of race, gender, and family to chart the ways that representations of the child typify historical periods and conflicting ideas. They build on the recent critical renaissance in childhood studies by bringing to their essays a wide range of critical practices and methodologies.

Although the volume is grounded heavily in the literary, it draws on other disciplines, revealing that representations of children and childhood are not isolated artifacts but cultural productions that in turn affect the social climates around them. Essayists look at games, pets, adolescent sexuality, death, family relations, and key texts such as The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and the movie Pocahontas; they reveal the ways in which the figure of the child operates as a rich vehicle for writers to consider evolving ideas of nation and the diverse role of citizens within it.
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American Childhood
Risks and Realities
Schneider, Dona
Rutgers University Press, 1995
What is happening to American youth today? There is a mountain of statistics gathered about our children, but it is often hard to know what the numbers mean. Dona Schneider argues that "sound- bite statistics" on teenage pregnancy or child abuse can mislead us and create bad public policy. But a closer look at those same statistics can give us a window on tomorrow's public health and social problems.

To show how the statistics can both disguise and highlight problems, Schneider alternates a discussion of the numbers with vivid encounters with individual children and adults: the middle-class black high school student's offhand explanation about how to get a gun; a vital statistics bureau worker's astonishment at his own classification as Hispanic; a young woman's pleasure in holding down a job after teachers dismissed her as learning disabled; and a latchkey child's nightmare of coming home from school to an empty house when she was sick.

This book guides us through the morass of numbers bandied about to describe the state of America's children—what the numbers tell us and what they don't—and it offers a call for action. Comprehensive in its treatment of all groups of children and accessible in style, this book is essential for anyone concerned about children in American society.
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America's Children
Resources from Family, Government, and the Economy
Donald J. Hernandez
Russell Sage Foundation, 1993
America's Children offers a valuable overview of the dramatic transformations in American childhood over the past fifty years, a period of historic shifts that reduced the human and material resources available to our children. Alarmingly, one fifth of all U.S. children now grow up in poverty, many are without health insurance, and about 30 percent never graduate from high school. Despite such conditions, economic, family, and educational programs for children earn low national priority and must depend on inconsistent state and local management. Drawing upon both historical and recent data, including census information from 1940 to 1980, Donald J. Hernandez provides a vivid portrait of children in America and puts forth a forceful case for overhauling our national child welfare policies. Hernandez shows how important revolutions in household composition and income, parental education and employment, childcare, and levels of poverty have affected children's well-being. As working wives and single mothers increasingly replace the traditional homemaker, children spend greater portions of time in educational and daycare facilities outside the home, and those with single mothers stand the greatest chance of being welfare dependent. Wider changes in society have created even greater stress for children in certain groups as they age: out-of-wedlock births are on the rise for white teenagers, half of all Hispanic youths never graduate high school, and violence accounts for nearly 90 per cent of all black teenage deaths. America's Children explores the interaction of many trends in children's lives and the fundamental social, demographic, and economic processes that lie at their core. The book concludes with a thoughtful analysis of the ability of families and government to provide for a new age of children, with emphasis on reducing racial inequities and providing greater public support for families, comparable to the family policies of other developed countries. As the traditional "Ozzie and Harriet" family recedes into collective memory, the importance of creating strong national policies for children is amplified, particularly in the areas of financial assistance, health insurance, education, and daycare. America's Children provides a compelling guide for reassessing the forces that shape our children and the resources available to safeguard their future.   "In this conceptually creative, methodologically rigorous, and empirically rich book, Hernandez uses census and survey data to describe several quite profound changes that have characterized the life courses of America's children and their families over the last 50 to 150 years....this erudite book is destined to be a classic." —Richard M. Lerner, Contemporary Psychology "America's Children goes a long way toward informing the debate on the causes of increasing poverty, and it challenges some widely held misperceptions....its study of resources available to children (and their families) lays a valuable foundation for surveying trends in family structure, education, and income sources....Anyone interested in the changing lives of children should read it; anyone interested in understanding the causes and patterns of poverty, and in designing a better welfare system, must read it." —Ellen B. Magenheim, Journal of Policy Analysis and Management   A Volume in the Russell Sage Foundation Census Series
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Assuring Child Support
An Extension of Social Security
Irwin Garfinkel
Russell Sage Foundation, 1992
In the United States, rates of divorce and out-of-wedlock childbirth are climbing so dramatically that over half of the next generation is likely to spend part of its childhood in single-mother families. As many as half of these families will live in poverty, caused in large measure by the failure of current government regulations to secure adequate child support from absent parents and to assure minimum support when parents cannot provide it. Assuring Child Support introduces the Child Support Assurance System, a remedy to this problem that is both feasible and affordable, a practical reform that is within the nation's grasp. "An extremely well-written and provocative book." —Eastern Economic Journal
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At A Loss For Words
How America Is Failing Our Children
Betty Bardige, foreword by T. Berry Brazelton, M.D.
Temple University Press, 2005
Drawing on the latest research on development among toddlers and preschoolers, At a Loss for Words lays out the importance of getting parents, policy makers, and child care providers to recognize the role of early literacy skills in reducing the achievement gap that begins before three years of age. Readers are guided through home and classroom settings that promote language, contrasting them with the "merely mediocre" child care settings in which more and more young children spend increasing amounts of time. Too many of our young children are not receiving the level of input and practice that will enable them to acquire language skills—the key to success in school and life. Bardige explains how to build better community support systems for children, and better public education, in order to ensure that toddlers learn the power of language from their families and teachers.
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At Play in Belfast
Children's Folklore and Identities in Northern Ireland
Lanclos, Donna M
Rutgers University Press, 2003
Donna M. Lanclos writes about children on the school playgrounds of working-class Belfast, Northern Ireland, using their own words to show how they shape their social identities. The notion that children's voices and perspectives must be included in a work about childhood is central to the book. Lanclos explores children's folklore, including skipping rhymes, clapping games, and "dirty" jokes, from five Belfast primary schools (two Protestant, two Catholic, and one mixed). She listens for what she can learn about gender, family, adult-child interactions, and Protestant/Catholic tensions. Lanclos frequently notes violent themes in the folklore and conversations that indicate children are aware of the reality in which they live. But at the same time, children resist being marginalized by adults who try to shield them from this reality.

For Lanclos, children's experiences stimulate discussions about culture and society. In her words, "Children's everyday lives are more than just preparation for their futures, but are life itself."

At Play in Belfast is a volume in the Rutgers Series in Childhood Studies, edited by Myra Bluebond-Langner.

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