front cover of Imagination and Play in the Electronic Age
Imagination and Play in the Electronic Age
Dorothy G. Singer and Jerome L. Singer
Harvard University Press, 2005

Television, video games, and computers are easily accessible to twenty-first-century children, but what impact do they have on creativity and imagination? In this book, two wise and long-admired observers of children's make-believe look at the cognitive and moral potential--and concern--created by electronic media.

As Dorothy and Jerome Singer show, violent images in games and TV are as toxic as many observers have feared by stimulating destructive ideas and troubling aggression. But should all electronic media be banned from children's lives? Calmly and authoritatively, the Singers argue that in fact some screen time can enrich children's creativity and play, and can even promote school readiness. With guidance from parents and teachers, empathy, creativity, and imagination can expand and intensify in the electronic age.

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front cover of In Sickness and in Play
In Sickness and in Play
Children Coping with Chronic Illness
Clark, Cindy Dell
Rutgers University Press, 2003

For children who live with a chronic illness, each day is filled with endless treatments, painful symptoms, confusion, and embarrassment. How can an eight-year old girl understand diabetes let alone explain to her schoolmates why she has to leave class to have her blood tested? How can the father of a child with asthma ever sleep soundly through the night with the fear that his son may suffocate in the next room.

In In Sickness and in Play, Cindy Dell Clark tells the stories of children who suffer from two common illnesses that are often underestimated by those not directly touched by them—asthma and diabetes. She describes how play, humor, and other expressive methods, invented by the kids themselves, allow families to cope with the pain. Clark’s work is one of the few studies to focus on maladies that kids must learn to live with rather than die from. Her interviews with forty-six families give readers an understanding of how children comprehend their illnesses and how parents struggle daily to care for their kids while trying to give them a “normal” childhood. Chronically ill children are at a greater risk of developing mental health or social adjustment problems than their peers, and asthma has been gaining ground in both incidence and fatality in recent years. Clark’s eye-opening work emphasizes the importance of improving the lives of these kids by understanding their perspectives, both imagined and real.

In Sickness and in Play is part of the Rutgers Series in Childhood Studies edited by Myra Bluebond-Langer.

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