At the heart of the study lie the municipal colonies de vacances, organized by the working-class cities of the Paris red belt. Located in remote villages or along the more inexpensive stretches of the Atlantic coast, the municipal colonies gathered their young clientele into variously structured "child villages," within which they were to live out particular, ideal visions of the collective life of children throughout the long summer holiday. Focusing on the creation of and participation in these summer camps, Laura Lee Downs presents surprising insights into the location and significance of childhood in French working-class cities and, ultimately, within the development of modern France.
Drawing on a rich array of historical sources, including dossiers and records of municipal colonies discovered in remote town halls of the Paris suburbs, newspaper accounts, and interviews with adults who participated in the colonies as children, Downs reveals how diverse groups—including local Socialist and Communist leaders and Catholic seminarians—seized the opportunity to shape the minds and bodies of working-class youth. Childhood in the Promised Land shows how, in creating the summer camps, these various groups combined pedagogical theories, religious convictions, political ideologies, and theories about the relationship between the countryside and children's physical and cognitive development. At the same time, the book sheds light on classic questions of social control, highlighting the active role of the children in shaping their experiences.
A century ago, a plump child was considered a healthy child. No longer. An overweight child is now known to be at risk for maladies ranging from asthma to cardiovascular disease, and obesity among American children has reached epidemic proportions. Childhood Obesity in America traces the changes in diagnosis and treatment, as well as popular understanding, of the most serious public health problem facing American children today.
Excess weight was once thought to be something children outgrew, or even a safeguard against infectious disease. But by the mid-twentieth century, researchers recognized early obesity as an indicator of lifelong troubles. Debates about its causes and proper treatment multiplied. Over the century, fat children were injected with animal glands, psychoanalyzed, given amphetamines, and sent to fat camp. In recent decades, an emphasis on taking personal responsibility for one’s health, combined with commercial interests, has affected the way the public health establishment has responded to childhood obesity—and the stigma fat children face. At variance with this personal emphasis is the realization that societal factors, including fast food, unsafe neighborhoods, and marketing targeted at children, are strongly implicated in weight gain. Activists and the courts are the most recent players in the obesity epidemic’s biography.
Today, obesity in this age group is seen as a complex condition, with metabolic, endocrine, genetic, psychological, and social elements. Laura Dawes makes a powerful case that understanding the cultural history of a disease is critical to developing effective health policy.
Only by discussing the unique challenges faced by all religions, and their followers, can we take the first step toward a greater understanding for all of us.
Each of six chapters, edited by world-class scholars, focuses on one religious tradition and includes an introduction and a selection of primary texts ranging from legal to liturgical and from the ancient to the contemporary. Through both the scholarly introductions and the primary sources, this comprehensive volume addresses a range of topics, from the sanctity of birth to a child's relationship to evil, showing that issues regarding children are central to understanding world religions and raising significant questions about our own conceptions of children today.
Children are increasingly a focus of international and national courts and truth commissions. Their participation, including through testimony that bears witness to their experiences, demonstrates their critical role in truth, justice, and reconciliation processes. If children are to engage, however, their rights must be respected.
This book includes analysis of the recent involvement of children in transitional justice processes in Liberia, Peru, Sierra Leone, and South Africa. It also explores key areas of current debates among legal scholars and child rights advocates, such as international criminal responsibility, traditional and restorative justice, reparations, psychosocial support for child witnesses, and links between education and reconciliation.
The book emphasizes how children must be engaged during post-conflict transition. If children are excluded, they may become vulnerable to a continuing cycle of violence, affecting future generations. In contrast, through active involvement in transitions, children and adolescents can be the catalysts for justice, reconciliation, and peace-building within their own families and communities.
More than nine generations of children grew up in America between the founding of the first English colonies and the end of the Civil War. This book, the first of three volumes that will provide the most complete documentary history of public provision for American children, traces the changing attitudes of the nation toward youth during the first two and one half centuries of its history.
The editors have divided volume I into three units of time--1600-1735, 1735-1820, 1820-1865 each of which represents a stage in the development of public policies toward children. The question raised in the first section is: What is the function of government or the public authority when the child is a subject, not a citizen, of a private family government? The second part deals with the question: How does the public sector respond when children, although still officially subject to familial authority, practice the doctrines of self-help, independence, and self-interest? The third part asks: How did the state and the adult public regard children in a society marked by political and social change, population mobility, and rapid economic growth? What was expected of children? What was done for them? What was denied them?
The editors have chosen documents chronicling all aspects of the welfare of children, including education, child health, care of dependent children, child labor, juvenile delinquency and the special problems of children of minority and disadvantaged groups. They have skillfully linked the papers together with interpretive introductions and have woven them into a fascinating and enlightening narrative. The documents have been selected from both published and unpublished materials, private diaries and correspondence, as well as the records of governmental and voluntary agencies on the local, state, and national levels. In addition to the time divisions, the documents are arranged geographically and topically, though the rigid maintenance of topical distinctions has been avoided so that related topics may be presented from different viewpoints and organized in the most meaningful and useful way.
Volume II will cover the events occurring between 1866 and 1932, and Volume III will deal with policies adopted and developed since 1933. Each volume will include selected contemporary illustrations.
Public provision for the rights of children has, at last, a complete documentary history. In three volumes, covering United States history from 1600 to the present, this is a monumental contribution in an area central to American domestic policy.
All aspects of the welfare of children are considered. The documents, as comprehensive as they are diverse, are woven into an enlightening narrative of the fundamental issues involved in the place of youth in America.
The concluding volumes present forty years of tumultuous history. They begin with the problems and protests of youth in the 1930s; their response to depression, war, and the draft; their organizations and participation in struggles for equality; and their changing legal status. With the advent of the New Deal and continuing into the Nixon administration, the sources show a growing popular emphasis on the rights and welfare of children as well as a dramatic shift in the position and commitment of the federal government. Policies and programs are many and vigorous, but gaps, protests, and inequalities persist.
Upon the appearance of the first volume, Children and Youth in America was hailed as "an important event in the history of child welfare in the United States." Now completed, these volumes constitute an indispensable reference and absorbing chronicle of American social history.
Although the number of people under twenty years of age in the United States rose from 17 million in 1860 to 47.6 million in 1930, the percentage of them in the total population declined sharply during the same seventy years from 51 percent to 38 percent. This declining proportion of children and young people to adults did not lessen concern for their welfare. On the contrary, as they became relatively less numerous, the young became in a way more visible, and their needs were more easily recognized.
This second of three volumes that trace the history of the nation's changing provisions for its youth covers the period from the end of the Civil War to the beginning of the New Deal. These were years rich in innovations which, although not fully realized, represented substantial advances in the welfare, education, and health of children. Much of the philanthropic energy of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries went into the provision of special facilities for children, who had formerly been treated in the same way as adults. State, and in some eases, federal legislation attempted to safeguard children against premature, excessive, and dangerous labor; sought to protect them against abuse. neglect, immorality, disease, and unsanitary surroundings: and compelled them to spend more time in school. The first White House Conference on the Care of Dependent and Neglected Children was convened by Theodore Roosevelt in 1909, and in 1912 the United States Children's Bureau was established. This single most important development in public provision for children during the early twentieth century signified the acceptance by the federal government of responsibility for promoting the health and welfare of the young.
In this two--book volume, major topics like the legal status of children, child health, and education have been broken down into specific areas so that the items of specialized concern are easily accessible. Some of the nearly 100 topics covered include birth control and abortion, the mothers' aid movement, theories and studies of juvenile delinquency, the progressive attack on child labor, and the child labor amendment. The Children's Bureau, the development of pediatric thought, the fight against infant mortality, child health and the Depression, the origin and development of the public high school, and the education of children of minority groups are also treated.
The text includes both published and unpublished, private and public documents. It is augmented with selected contemporary illustrations.
Head Start. Bilingual education. Small class size. Social promotion. School funding. Virtually every school system in America has had to face these issues over the past thirty years. Advocates and dissenters have declared confidently that "the research" is on their side. But is it?
In the first book to bring together the recent history of educational policy and politics with the research evidence, Timothy Hacsi presents the illuminating, often-forgotten stories of these five controversial topics. He sifts through the complicated evaluation research literature and compares the policies that have been adopted to the best evidence about what actually works. He lucidly explains what the major studies show, what they don't, and how they have been misunderstood and misrepresented. Hacsi shows how rarely educational policies are based on solid research evidence, and how programs that sound plausible simply do not satisfy the complex needs of real children.
Mark Jones examines the making of a new child’s world in Japan between 1890 and 1930 and focuses on the institutions, groups, and individuals that reshaped both the idea of childhood and the daily life of children. Family reformers, scientific child experts, magazine editors, well-educated mothers, and other prewar urban elites constructed a model of childhood—having one’s own room, devoting time to homework, reading children’s literature, playing with toys—that ultimately became the norm for young Japanese in subsequent decades.
This book also places the story of modern childhood within a broader social context—the emergence of a middle class in early twentieth century Japan. The ideal of making the child into a “superior student” (yutosei) appealed to the family seeking upward mobility and to the nation-state that needed disciplined, educated workers able to further Japan’s capitalist and imperialist growth. This view of the middle class as a child-centered, educationally obsessed, socially aspiring stratum survived World War II and prospered into the years beyond.
Is there evidence of children in the archaeological record? Some would answer no, that "subadults" can only be distinguished when there is osteological confirmation. Others might suggest that the reason children don’t exist in prehistory is because no one has looked for them, much as no one had looked for women in the same context until recently.
Focusing on the Southwest, contributors to this volume attempt to find some of those children, or at least show how they might be found. They address two issues: what was the cultural construction of childhood? What were childrens' lives like?
Determining how cultures with written records have constructed childhood in the past is hard enough, but the difficulty is magnified in the case of ancient Puebloan societies. The contributors here offer approaches from careful analysis of artifacts and skeletal remains to ethnographic evidence in rock art. Topics include ceramics and evidence of child manufacture and painting, cradleboards, evidence of child labor, and osteological evidence of health conditions.
Significant numbers of the people enslaved throughout world history have been children. The vast literature on slavery has grown to include most of the history of this ubiquitous practice, but nearly all of it concentrates on the adult males whose strong bodies and laboring capacities preoccupied the masters of the modern Americas. Children in Slavery through the Ages examines the children among the enslaved across a significant range of earlier times and other places; its companion volume will examine the children enslaved in recent American contexts and in the contemporary/modern world.
This is the first collection to focus on children in slavery. These leading scholars bring our thinking about slaving and slavery to new levels of comprehensiveness and complexity. They further provide substantial historical depth to the abuse of children for sexual and labor purposes that has become a significant humanitarian concern of governments and private organizations around the world in recent decades.
The collected essays in Children in Slavery through the Ages fundamentally reconstruct our understanding of enslavement by exploring the often-ignored role of children in slavery and rejecting the tendency to narrowly equate slavery with the forced labor of adult males. The volume’s historical angle highlights many implications of child slavery by examining the variety of children’s roles—as manual laborers and domestic servants to court entertainers and eunuchs—and the worldwide regions in which the child slave trade existed.
Today nearly half of all people in the Middle East are under the age of fifteen. Yet little is known about the new generation of boys and girls who are growing up in a world vastly different from that of their parents, a generation who will be the leaders of tomorrow. This groundbreaking anthology is an attempt to look at the current situation of children by presenting materials by both Middle Eastern and Western scholars. Many of the works have been translated from Arabic, Persian, and French.
The forty-one pieces are organized into sections on the history of childhood, growing up, health, work, education, politics and war, and play and the arts. They are presented in many forms: essays in history and social science, poems, proverbs, lullabies, games, and short stories. Countries represented are Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Tunisia, Israel/West Bank, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Sudan, Lebanon, Turkey, Yemen, and Afghanistan.
This book complements Elizabeth Fernea's earlier works, Women and the Family in the Middle East and Middle Eastern Muslim Women Speak (coedited with Basima Bezirgan). Like them, it will be important reading for everyone interested in the Middle East and in women's and children's issues.
The first comprehensive look at youth living in a country attempting to rebuild itself after three decades of civil conflict, Children of Afghanistan relies on the research and fieldwork of twenty-one experts to cover an incredible range of topics. Focusing on the full scope of childhood, from birth through young adulthood, this edited volume examines a myriad of issues: early childhood socialization in war and peace; education, literacy, vocational training, and apprenticeship; refugee life; mental and physical health, including disabilities and nutrition; children’s songs, folktales, and art; sports and play; orphans; life on the streets; child labor and children as family breadwinners; child soldiers and militarization; sexual exploitation; growing up in prison; marriage; family violence; and other issues vital to understanding, empowerment, and transformation.
Children of Afghanistan is the first volume that not only attempts to analyze the range of challenges facing Afghan children across class, gender, and region but also offers solutions to the problems they face. With nearly half of the population under the age of fifteen, the future of the country no doubt lies with its children. Those who seek peace for the region must find solutions to the host of crises that have led the United Nations to call Afghanistan “the worst place on earth to be born.” The authors of Children of Afghanistan provide child-centered solutions to rebuilding the country’s cultural, social, and economic institutions.
The culmination of twenty years of research, this book is a cross-cultural exploration of the ways in which age, gender, and culture affect the development of social behavior in children. The authors and their associates observed children between the ages of two and ten going about their daily lives in communities in Africa, India, the Philippines, Okinawa, Mexico, and the United States. This rich fund of data has enabled them to identify the types of social behavior that are universal and those which differ from one cultural environment to another.
Whiting and Edwards shed new light on the nature-nurture question: in analyzing the behavior of young children, they focus on the relative contributions of universal physiological maturation and universal social imperatives. They point out cross-cultural similarities, but also note the differences in experience between children who grow up in simple and in complex societies. They show that knowledge of the company children keep, and of the proportion of time they spend with various categories of people, makes it possible to predict important aspects of their interpersonal behavior.
An extension and elaboration of the classic Children of Six Cultures (Harvard, 1975), Children of Different Worlds will appeal to the same audience—developmental psychologists, social psychologists, anthropologists, and educators—and is sure to be equally influential.
Milanich pays particular attention to family law, arguing that liberal legal reforms wrought in the 1850s, which left the paternity of illegitimate children purposely unrecorded, reinforced not only patriarchal power but also hierarchies of class. Through vivid stories culled from judicial and notarial sources and from a cache of documents found in the closet of a Santiago orphanage, she reveals how law and bureaucracy helped create an anonymous underclass bereft of kin entitlements, dependent on the charity of others, and marginalized from public bureaucracies. Milanich also challenges the recent scholarly emphasis on state formation by highlighting the enduring importance of private, informal, and extralegal relations of power within and across households. Children of Fate demonstrates how the study of children can illuminate the social organization of gender and class, liberalism, law, and state power in modern Latin America.
Four plays by ancient Greece’s third great tragedian.
One of antiquity's greatest poets, Euripides has been prized in every age for the pathos, terror, and intellectual probing of his dramatic creations. The new Loeb Classical Library edition of his plays is in six volumes.
Volume II contains Children of Heracles, about Athens' protection of the dead hero's children; Hippolytus, which tells of the punishment Aphrodite inflicts on a man who refuses to worship her; Andromache and Hecuba, the tragic stories of two noble Trojan women after their city's fall.
In Children of Hope, Sandra Rowoldt Shell traces the lives of sixty-four Oromo children who were enslaved in Ethiopia in the late-nineteenth century, liberated by the British navy, and ultimately sent to Lovedale Institution, a Free Church of Scotland mission in the Eastern Cape, South Africa, for their safety. Because Scottish missionaries in Yemen interviewed each of the Oromo children shortly after their liberation, we have sixty-four structured life histories told by the children themselves.
In the historiography of slavery and the slave trade, first passage narratives are rare, groups of such narratives even more so. In this analytical group biography (or prosopography), Shell renders the experiences of the captives in detail and context that are all the more affecting for their dispassionate presentation. Comparing the children by gender, age, place of origin, method of capture, identity, and other characteristics, Shell enables new insights unlike anything in the existing literature for this region and period.
Children of Hope is supplemented by graphs, maps, and illustrations that carefully detail the demographic and geographic layers of the children’s origins and lives after capture. In this way, Shell honors the individual stories of each child while also placing them into invaluable and multifaceted contexts.
Now in the midst of the largest wave of immigration in history, America, mythical land of immigrants, is once again contemplating a future in which new arrivals will play a crucial role in reworking the fabric of the nation. At the center of this prospect are the children of immigrants, who make up one fifth of America's youth. This book, written by the codirectors of the largest ongoing longitudinal study of immigrant children and their families, offers a clear, broad, interdisciplinary view of who these children are and what their future might hold.
For immigrant children, the authors write, it is the best of times and the worst. These children are more likely than any previous generation of immigrants to end up in Ivy League universities--or unschooled, on parole, or in prison. Most arrive as motivated students, respectful of authority and quick to learn English. Yet, at the same time, many face huge obstacles to success, such as poverty, prejudice, the trauma of immigration itself, and exposure to the materialistic, hedonistic world of their native-born peers.
The authors vividly describe how forces within and outside the family shape these children's developing sense of identity and their ambivalent relationship with their adopted country. Their book demonstrates how "Americanization," long an immigrant ideal, has, in a nation so diverse and full of contradictions, become ever harder to define, let alone achieve.
Winner, Betty and Alfred McClung Lee Book Award, Association for Humanist Sociology, 2016
Outstanding Scholarly Contribution Award of the Section on Children and Youth, American Sociological Association, 2016
Honorable Mention, Leo Goodman Award, Methodology Section, American Sociological Association, 2016
When children experience upheaval and trauma, adults often view them as either vulnerable and helpless or as resilient and able to easily “bounce back.” But the reality is far more complex for the children and youth whose lives are suddenly upended by disaster. How are children actually affected by catastrophic events and how do they cope with the damage and disruption?
Children of Katrina offers one of the only long-term, multiyear studies of young people following disaster. Sociologists Alice Fothergill and Lori Peek spent seven years after Hurricane Katrina interviewing and observing several hundred children and their family members, friends, neighbors, teachers, and other caregivers. In this book, they focus intimately on seven children between the ages of three and eighteen, selected because they exemplify the varied experiences of the larger group. They find that children followed three different post-disaster trajectories—declining, finding equilibrium, and fluctuating—as they tried to regain stability. The children’s moving stories illuminate how a devastating disaster affects individual health and well-being, family situations, housing and neighborhood contexts, schooling, peer relationships, and extracurricular activities. This work also demonstrates how outcomes were often worse for children who were vulnerable and living in crisis before the storm. Fothergill and Peek clarify what kinds of assistance children need during emergency response and recovery periods, as well as the individual, familial, social, and structural factors that aid or hinder children in getting that support.
The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness, first published in 1944, is considered one of the most profound and relevant works by the influential theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, and certainly the fullest statement of his political philosophy. Written and first read during the prolonged, tragic world war between totalitarian and democratic forces, Niebuhr’s book took up the timely question of how democracy as a political system could best be defended.
Most proponents of democracy, Niebuhr claimed, were “children of light,” who had optimistic but naïve ideas about how society could be rid of evil and governed by enlightened reason. They needed, he believed, to absorb some of the wisdom and strength of the “children of darkness,” whose ruthless cynicism and corrupt, anti-democratic politics should otherwise be repudiated. He argued for a prudent, liberal understanding of human society that took the measure of every group’s self-interest and was chastened by a realistic understanding of the limits of power. It is in the foreword to this book that he wrote, “Man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible; but man’s inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.”
Researchers in child development often study children in isolation--apart from the environmental influences that shape, nurture, or harm them. In Children of Social Worlds, leading social scientists show how much is lost by this approach. Their underlying assumption is that children's psychological development can be understood only in the context of the social worlds in which they grow up and that the disciplinary boundaries of traditional psychology must be expanded. This book offers insights from scholars in a variety of disciplines--anthropology, education, linguistics, economics, medicine, and law, in addition to psychology. The result is a wide-angle perspective on child development based on some of the best research in the field.
The authors look particularly at broad trends and patterns, addressing such issues as the effect of institutions on family life, the changing roles of parents, cross-generational effects on development, the status of children in the legal system, schooling and learning, gender differences, the acquisition of communication skills, and the psychological impact of the nuclear threat. Chapters on cultural and historical definitions of the family add depth to their argument. Included, too, are discussions of emotional development and psychoanalytic theory, topics that are receiving increasing attention. The authors also reflect on the directions that research is likely to take in the future.
This well-balanced, closely integrated volume is full of innovative ideas and is written in a style that will be accessible to both specialists and students. As an incisive and informed evaluation of the field, it is sure to become an essential resource for psychologists, social workers, psychotherapists, social policy analysts--all who are concerned with human development in its social context.
The second novel in Anaïs Nin’s Cities of the Interior series, Children of the Albatross is divided into two sections: “The Sealed Room” focuses on the dancer Djuna and a set of characters, chiefly male, who surround her; “The Café” brings together a cast of characters already familiar to Nin’s readers, but it is their meeting place that is the focal point of the story.
As always, in Children of the Albatross, Nin’s writing is inseparable from her life. From Djuna’s story, told in “The Sealed Room” through hints and allusions, hazy in their details and chronology, the most important event to emerge is her father’s desertion (as Nin’s father did) when she was sixteen. By rejecting realistic writing for the experience and intuitions she drew from her diary, Nin was able to forge a novelistic style emphasizing free association, spontaneity, and improvisation, a technique that finds its parallel in the jazz music performed at the café where Nin’s characters meet.
Children of the Albatross is divided into two sections: “The Sealed Room” focuses on the dancer Djuna and a set of characters, chiefly male, who surround her; “The Café” brings together a cast of characters already familiar to Nin’s readers, but it is their meeting place that is the focal point of the story.
As always, in Children of the Albatross, Nin’s writing is inseparable from her life. From Djuna’s story, told in “The Sealed Room” through hints and allusions, hazy in their details and chronology, the most important event to emerge is her father’s desertion (like Nin’s) when she was sixteen. By rejecting realistic writing for the experience and intuitions she drew from her diary, Nin was able to forge a novelistic style emphasizing free association, spontaneity, and improvisation, a technique that finds its parallel in the jazz music performed at the café where Nin’s characters meet.
For those who lived in the wake of the French Revolution, from the storming of the Bastille to Napoleon’s final defeat, its aftermath left a profound wound that no subsequent king, emperor, or president could heal. Children of the Revolution follows the ensuing generations who repeatedly tried and failed to come up with a stable regime after the trauma of 1789. The process encouraged fresh and often murderous oppositions between those who were for, and those who were against, the Revolution’s values. Bearing the scars of their country’s bloody struggle, and its legacy of deeply divided loyalties, the French lived the long nineteenth century in the shadow of the revolutionary age.
Despite the ghosts raised in this epic tale, Robert Gildea has written a richly engaging and provocative book. His is a strikingly unfamiliar France, a country with an often overwhelming gap between Paris and the provinces, a country torn apart by fratricidal hatreds and a tortured history of feminism, the site of political catastrophes and artistic triumphs, and a country that managed—despite a pervasive awareness of its own fall from grace—to fix itself squarely at the heart of modernity. Indeed, Gildea reveals how the collective recognition of the great costs of the Revolution galvanized the French to achieve consensus in a new republic and to integrate the tumultuous past into their sense of national identity. It was in this spirit that France’s young men went to the front in World War I with a powerful sense of national confidence and purpose.
Ibtihal Salem's writing provides an excellent forum for studying both everyday life in Egypt and current literary experimentation in the Middle East. Her poignant pieces hover between the structure of story-telling, the visuality of vignettes, and the compression of poetry. They both record and evoke a literary ferment going on in Egypt today.
Salem's writing of the last thirty years is lauded for its social messages also. Finding the expression of sexuality necessary to explicate problems of Egyptian identity, Salem often links poverty to gender marginality. Her heroines, however, celebrate the heritages that have shaped them, even as they resist certain aspects of them. Like many writers in Egypt, Salem honors traditional folktales, even as she deals with contemporary problems from class and economic perspectives.
Marilyn Booth, one of the best translators of Arabic fiction working today, has dealt in her introduction to this collection with the unusual experimental form by examining Salem's craft as well as the contextual history surrounding the stories. Since Salem is writing "across genres," Booth helps the reader also by opening each piece with an explanatory comment, often quoting the author, and thus further illuminating Salem's portrayals of lives bounded by Egypt's waters—the Canal, the Nile, and the Mediterranean.
A one-year-old attempting to build a tower of blocks may bring the pile crashing down, yet her five-year-old sister accomplishes this task with ease. Why do young children have difficulty with problems that present no real challenge to older children? How do problem-solving skills develop? In Children Solving Problems, Stephanie Thornton surveys recent research from a broad range of perspectives in order to explore this important question.
What Thornton finds may come as a surprise: successful problem-solving depends less on how smart we are—or, as the pioneering psychologist Jean Piaget claimed, how advanced our skill in logical reasoning is—and more on the factual knowledge we acquire as we learn and interpret cues from the world around us.
Problem-solving skills evolve through experience and dynamic interaction with a problem. But equally important—as the Russian psychologist L. S. Vygotsky proposed—is social interaction. Successful problem-solving is a social process. Sharing problem-solving tasks—with skilled adults and with other children—is vital to a child’s growth in expertise and confidence. In problem-solving, confidence can be more important than skill.
In a real sense, problem-solving lies at the heart of what we mean by intelligence. The ability to identify a goal, to work out how to achieve it, and to carry out that plan is the essence of every intelligent activity. Could it be, Thornton suggests, that problem-solving processes provide the fundamental machinery for cognitive development? In Children Solving Problems she synthesizes the dramatic insights and findings of post-Piagetian research and sets the agenda for the next stage in understanding the varied phenomena of children’s problem-solving.
A window on the insular world of autism, this book offers a rare close look at the mysterious condition that afflicts approximately 350,000 Americans and affects millions more. As they make sense of the many features of autism at every level of intellectual functioning across the life span, Marian Sigman and Lisa Capps weave together clinical vignettes, research findings, methodological considerations, and historical accounts. The result is a compelling, comprehensive view of the disorder, as true to human experience as it is to scientific observation.
Children with Autism is unique in that it views autism through the lens of developmental psychopathology, a discipline grounded in the belief that studies of normal and abnormal development can inform and enhance one another. Sigman and Capps conduct readers through the course of development from infancy to adulthood, outlining the differences between normal and autistic individuals at each stage and highlighting the links between growth in cognitive, social, and emotional domains. In particular, Sigman and Capps suggest that deficits in social understanding emerge in the early infancy of autistic children, and they explore how these deficits organize the development of autistic individuals through the course of their lives. They also examine the effects certain characteristics can have on an autistic person's adjustment over time. Their book concludes with an overview of existing interventions and promising avenues for further research.
Most parents care deeply about their children. If that were enough, we would not see the inequalities we currently do in children’s opportunities and healthy development—children out of school, children laboring, children living in poverty. While the scale of the problems can seem overwhelming, history has shown that massive progress is possible on problems that once seemed unsolvable. Within the span of less than twenty-five years, the proportion of people living in extreme poverty has been cut in half, the number of children under age five that die each day has dropped by over 12,000, and the percentage of girls attending school has climbed from just three in four to over 90 percent.
National action, laws, and public policies fundamentally shape children’s opportunities. Children’s Chances urges a transformational shift from focusing solely on survival to targeting children’s full and healthy development. Drawing on never-before-available comparative data on laws and public policies in 190 countries, Jody Heymann and Kristen McNeill tell the story of what works and what countries around the world are doing to ensure equal opportunities for all children. Covering poverty, discrimination, education, health, child labor, child marriage, and parental care, Children’s Chances identifies the leaders and the laggards, highlights successes and setbacks, and provides a guide for what needs to be done to make equal chances for all children a reality.
David Foulkes is one of the international leaders in the empirical study of children’s dreaming, and a pioneer of sleep laboratory research with children. In this book, which distills a lifetime of study, Foulkes shows that dreaming as we normally understand it—active stories in which the dreamer is an actor—appears relatively late in childhood. This true dreaming begins between the ages of 7 and 9. He argues that this late development of dreaming suggests an equally late development of waking reflective self-awareness.
Foulkes offers a spirited defense of the independence of the psychological realm, and the legitimacy of studying it without either psychoanalytic over-interpretation or neurophysiological reductionism.
A collection of orginal essays by scholars from a variety of fields-- includng American studies, folklore, anthropology, pyschology, sociology, and education---Children's Folklore: A Source Book moves beyond traditional social-science views of child development. It reveals the complexity and artistry of interactions among children, challenging stereotypes of simple childhood innocence and conventional explanations of development that privilege sober and sensible adult outcomes. Instead, the play and lore of children is shown to be often disruptive, wayward, and irrational.
Anyone who knows children understands the importance of their relationships with one another. But until recently, psychology has offered little to illuminate children's friendships, assuming Instead that development is largely determined by the relationship between parent and child. Now, however, a new psychology of the child's social world has begun to take shape. Zick Rubin's book provides a graceful introduction to this work, written in the clear, nontechnical style that readers have come to expect of the Developing Child series.
Children's Friendships covers such questions as how friendship develops out of the simple play among young toddlers, how the child's conception of friendship changes with increasing cognitive sophistication, how individuals become popular or unpopular and how each affects them, why children form cliques, adopt stereotypes, follow fads, and (almost universally) exclude members of the opposite sex in the years just before puberty. The author's answers to these and other questions may surprise even the most experienced child-watcher.
Whether we like it or not, children learn a great deal—both cognitively and emotionally—from one another. Children's Friendships provides important insight into this kind of learning that all interested adults will find extremely valuable.
Ever since children have learned to read, there has been children’s literature. Children’s Literature charts the makings of the Western literary imagination from Aesop’s fables to Mother Goose, from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland to Peter Pan, from Where the Wild Things Are to Harry Potter.
The only single-volume work to capture the rich and diverse history of children’s literature in its full panorama, this extraordinary book reveals why J. R. R. Tolkien, Dr. Seuss, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Beatrix Potter, and many others, despite their divergent styles and subject matter, have all resonated with generations of readers. Children’s Literature is an exhilarating quest across centuries, continents, and genres to discover how, and why, we first fall in love with the written word.
“Lerer has accomplished something magical. Unlike the many handbooks to children’s literature that synopsize, evaluate, or otherwise guide adults in the selection of materials for children, this work presents a true critical history of the genre. . . . Scholarly, erudite, and all but exhaustive, it is also entertaining and accessible. Lerer takes his subject seriously without making it dull.”—Library Journal (starred review)
“Lerer’s history reminds us of the wealth of literature written during the past 2,600 years. . . . With his vast and multidimensional knowledge of literature, he underscores the vital role it plays in forming a child’s imagination. We are made, he suggests, by the books we read.”—San Francisco Chronicle
“There are dazzling chapters on John Locke and Empire, and nonsense, and Darwin, but Lerer’s most interesting chapter focuses on girls’ fiction. . . . A brilliant series of readings.”—Diane Purkiss, Times Literary Supplement
Between 1933 and 1945, National Socialists enacted a focused effort to propagandize children’s literature by distorting existing German values and traditions with the aim of creating a homogenous “folk community.” A vast censorship committee in Berlin oversaw the publication, revision, and distribution of books and textbooks for young readers, exercising its control over library and bookstore content as well as over new manuscripts, so as to redirect the cultural consumption of the nation’s children. In particular, the Nazis emphasized Nordic myths and legends with a focus on the fighting spirit of the saga heroes, their community loyalty, and a fierce spirit of revenge—elements that were then applied to the concepts of loyalty to and sacrifice for the Führer and the fatherland. They also tolerated select popular series, even though these were meant to be replaced by modern Hitler Youth camping stories.
In this important book, first published in 1984 and now back in print, Christa Kamenetsky demonstrates how Nazis used children’s literature to selectively shape a “Nordic Germanic” worldview that was intended to strengthen the German folk community, the Führer, and the fatherland by imposing a racial perspective on mankind. Their efforts corroded the last remnants of the Weimar Republic’s liberal education, while promoting an enthusiastic following for Hitler.
This book was prepared by the Office of Technology Assessment at the request of Senators Mark Hatfield and Daniel Inouye. It acknowledges that there are no simple solutions to the problems we face or easy answers to questions concerning the best system of mental health service delivery. Yet Children's Mental Health makes it abundantly clear that there is a need for a mental health system response to these issues and that this response must be coordinated with other existing service systems.
This book should be of value to concerned parents and community leaders, health system planners, and health care practitioners involved with both the needs of children and mental illness.
How do children learn the intangible rules of conversation? How do they make talk “work”? Adults usually regard talk as a simple means of conveying information. Catherine Garvey’s examination of children’s talk reveals, however, that much more than this goes on in any conversational exchange.
Talk always takes place in a particular situation or context: the speakers are continuously interpreting what is going on, and they adjust their responses accordingly. To be sure that the message is received, children must learn to engage the attention of the other person, to take turns at talking, and to set up signals for the beginning and end of conversation. They learn to confirm that the intended meaning is understood and to evaluate the acceptability of the message, and they acquire an understanding of the ritual aspects of talk, including marks of courtesy such as “please” and “thank you,” displays of attentiveness, and an awareness of interpersonal status. Children must also learn to say “no,” to use talk to reach a goal, and to interpret the differences in the ways other people talk.
Garvey explains the importance of talk to children’s socialization and development and shows why talk is an integral and revealing part of the child’s life that reflects important changes in thinking and social interaction.
Megacities such as Santiago are becoming a worldwide phenomenon. In six of eleven South American countries, over 25 percent of the population lives in a single city. What policies should national governments adopt with regard to dominant metropolises? Is it appropriate to restrict the flow of population to big cities? Or should governments take a laissez-faire attitude and permit city growth?
Focusing on Chile, this book argues that appropriate government action lies between these extremes. The authors espouse spatial policies that mitigate the social costs of congestion and pollution but also ensure that migrants pay the social costs of moving to big cities.
Texts and images, each introduced by the editors, provide insights into the ways that Chile's unique geography has shaped its national identity, the country's unusually violent colonial history, and the stable but autocratic republic that emerged after independence from Spain. They shed light on Chile's role in the world economy, the social impact of economic modernization, and the enduring problems of deep inequality. The Reader also covers Chile's bold experiments with reform and revolution, its subsequent descent into one of Latin America's most ruthless Cold War dictatorships, and its much-admired transition to democracy and a market economy in the years since dictatorship.
READERS
Browse our collection.
PUBLISHERS
See BiblioVault's publisher services.
STUDENT SERVICES
Files for college accessibility offices.
UChicago Accessibility Resources
home | accessibility | search | about | contact us
BiblioVault ® 2001 - 2024
The University of Chicago Press