In 1973, San Francisco allergist Ben Feingold created an uproar by claiming that synthetic food additives triggered hyperactivity, then the most commonly diagnosed childhood disorder in the United States. He contended that the epidemic should not be treated with drugs such as Ritalin but, instead, with a food additive-free diet. Parents and the media considered his treatment, the Feingold diet, a compelling alternative. Physicians, however, were skeptical and designed dozens of trials to challenge the idea. The resulting medical opinion was that the diet did not work and it was rejected.

Matthew Smith asserts that those scientific conclusions were, in fact, flawed. An Alternative History of Hyperactivity explores the origins of the Feingold diet, revealing why it became so popular, and the ways in which physicians, parents, and the public made decisions about whether it was a valid treatment for hyperactivity. Arguing that the fate of Feingold's therapy depended more on cultural, economic, and political factors than on the scientific protocols designed to test it, Smith suggests the lessons learned can help resolve medical controversies more effectively.

In his memoir, David Sorensen explores his identity as a coda, or a child of Deaf adults. He describes his experiences with the roles often placed on codas at a young age, such as interpreter, confidant, and decision-maker. His story reveals a person seeking acceptance and belonging while straddling the Deaf and hearing worlds, and shows how he found reconciliation within himself and with both worlds.

       Sorensen relays the dynamics of his family life; he had a strained relationship with his father, who was an active leader and role model in the Deaf community and the Mormon Church, yet struggled to bond with his own son. Sorensen rebelled as a youth and left home as a teenager, completely detaching from the Deaf community. After struggling to establish himself as an independent adult, he discovered that he wanted to return to the Deaf world and use his ASL fluency and cultural understanding as a mental health therapist and community advocate. Now he considers himself an ambassador between the Deaf and hearing worlds, as well as between the older and younger generations of Deaf people. Between Two Worlds: My Life as a Child of Deaf Adults shares the unique experiences of a coda and passes on the rich cultural past shared by the American Deaf community.

The classic work that revealed the complicated world of children's play, and what we can learn from it for education

For more than forty years, Boys and Girls has a classic account of the little-known world that young children create together when they play. Vivian Gussin Paley takes readers inside a kindergarten classroom to show them in detail how boys and girls play—and how, by playing and fantasizing in different ways, they work through complicated notions of gender roles and identity. The children’s own conversations, stories, playacting, and scuffles are interwoven with Paley’s observations and accounts of her vain attempts to alter their stereotyped play. In the decades since the book's original publication, play in kindergarten and early years of school has lost ground to structured teaching and even testing, which makes Paley's book, updated for a new era, more important than ever. To teach kids successfully, we must make space for play.

Victor Erlich was born in 1914, at the threshold of what the great Russian poet Anna Akhmatova called "the real twentieth century," in Petrograd, a place indelibly marked by that century's violent dislocations and upheavals. His story, begun on the eve of the First World War and taking him through Russia, Poland, Lithuania, Germany, and the U. S. Army, is in many ways a memoir of that "real twentieth century," reflecting its lethal nature and shaped by the "fearful symmetry" of the age of totalitarianism. Erlich's grandfather, the legendary Jewish historian Simon Dubnov, was felled in December 1941 by a Nazi bullet; his father, Henryk Erlich, a leader of the Jewish Bund and a prominent figure in Russian and Polish socialism, took his life in Stalin's prison in May 1942. To read about Erlich's life growing up at the intersection of the century's darkest currents is to experience history firsthand from the Russian Revolution to the end of the Second World War-and to know what it truly is to be a child of the century.

Erlich conjures up what it was like to be a Bundist, the intensity of Socialist life at the time, the thinking after the Nazi invasion of Poland-before the pact between Hitler and Stalin became apparent. Figures such as Eleanor Roosevelt, Wendel Wilkie, Marc and Bella Chagall make appearances, as well as the famous logician Tarski, flunking Erlich in math. Throughout, despite the darkness, even the horror, of much of what he describes, the author maintains the beguiling tone and the warm manner of one who has reached the new millennium with rare and hard-won insight into the human comedy of his time.

Child of the Fire is the first book-length examination of the career of the nineteenth-century artist Mary Edmonia Lewis, best known for her sculptures inspired by historical and biblical themes. Throughout this richly illustrated study, Kirsten Pai Buick investigates how Lewis and her work were perceived, and their meanings manipulated, by others and the sculptor herself. She argues against the racialist art discourse that has long cast Lewis’s sculptures as reflections of her identity as an African American and Native American woman who lived most of her life abroad. Instead, by seeking to reveal Lewis’s intentions through analyses of her career and artwork, Buick illuminates Lewis’s fraught but active participation in the creation of a distinct “American” national art, one dominated by themes of indigeneity, sentimentality, gender, and race. In so doing, she shows that the sculptor variously complicated and facilitated the dominant ideologies of the vanishing American (the notion that Native Americans were a dying race), sentimentality, and true womanhood.

Buick considers the institutions and people that supported Lewis’s career—including Oberlin College, abolitionists in Boston, and American expatriates in Italy—and she explores how their agendas affected the way they perceived and described the artist. Analyzing four of Lewis’s most popular sculptures, each created between 1866 and 1876, Buick discusses interpretations of Hiawatha in terms of the cultural impact of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s epic poem The Song of Hiawatha; Forever Free and Hagar in the Wilderness in light of art historians’ assumptions that artworks created by African American artists necessarily reflect African American themes; and The Death of Cleopatra in relation to broader problems of reading art as a reflection of identity.

The second installment in Laxalt's Basque-family trilogy, this novel takes an adult-aged Pete to the Basque Country to uncover his parents' secret reasons for immigrating to the U.S. Pete finds himself stepping back into a medieval morality, into the rigid and unrelenting code of his ancestors, older and stronger than reason. Denied by his own blood kin, cold anger forges his determination to pierce the silence of the villagers and learn the circumstances of Maitia’s, his mother’s birth. One by one, the ghosts rise up, piecing together the story of Maitia’s shame and her resolve to gain the respect that could only be found in America. Interwoven is the story of Petya, Pete’s father, forced to flee the high Pyrenees by accident and find a new life as a lonely sheepherder in the northern deserts of Nevada. His struggles with loneliness and the temptations of emerging manhood provide a background for the stark reality of a young immigrant whose pain and growing sense of self-determination transform him into the essential being we know as American.

Generation Anthropocene. Storms of My Grandchildren. Our Children’s Trust. Why do these and other attempts to imagine the planet’s uncertain future return us—again and again—to the image of the child? In The Child to Come, Rebekah Sheldon demonstrates the pervasive conjunction of the imperiled child and the threatened Earth and blisteringly critiques the logic of catastrophe that serves as its motive and its method. 

Sheldon explores representations of this perilous future and the new figurations of the child that have arisen in response to it. Analyzing catastrophe discourse from the 1960s to the present—books by Joanna Russ, Margaret Atwood, and Cormac McCarthy; films and television series including Southland Tales, Battlestar Galactica, and Children of Men; and popular environmentalism—Sheldon finds the child standing in the place of the human species, coordinating its safe passage into the future through the promise of one more generation. Yet, she contends, the child figure emerges bound to the very forces of nonhuman vitality he was forged to contain. 

Bringing together queer theory, ecocriticism, and science studies, The Child to Come draws on and extends arguments in childhood studies about the interweaving of the child with the life sciences. Sheldon reveals that neither life nor the child are what they used to be. Under pressure from ecological change, artificial reproductive technology, genetic engineering, and the neoliberalization of the economy, the queerly human child signals something new: the biopolitics of reproduction. By promising the pliability of the body’s vitality, the pregnant woman and the sacred child have become the paradigmatic figures for twenty-first century biopolitics. 

The buzz word in education today is accountability. But the federal mandate of "no child left behind" has come to mean curriculums driven by preparation for standardized tests and quantifiable learning results. Even for very young children, unstructured creative time in the classroom is waning as teachers and administrators are under growing pressures to measure school readiness through rote learning and increased homework. In her new book, Vivian Gussin Paley decries this rapid disappearance of creative time and makes the case for the critical role of fantasy play in the psychological, intellectual, and social development of young children.

A Child's Work goes inside classrooms around the globe to explore the stunningly original language of children in their role-playing and storytelling. Drawing from their own words, Paley examines how this natural mode of learning allows children to construct meaning in their worlds, meaning that carries through into their adult lives. Proof that play is the work of children, this compelling and enchanting book will inspire and instruct teachers and parents as well as point to a fundamental misdirection in today's educational programs and strategies.

Throughout American literature, the figure of the child is often represented in opposition to the adult. In Cradle of Liberty Caroline F. Levander proposes that this opposition is crucial to American political thought and the literary cultures that surround and help produce it. Levander argues that from the late eighteenth century through the early twentieth, American literary and political texts did more than include child subjects: they depended on them to represent, naturalize, and, at times, attempt to reconfigure the ground rules of US national belonging. She demonstrates how, as the modern nation-state and the modern concept of the child (as someone fundamentally different from the adult) emerged in tandem from the late eighteenth century forward, the child and the nation-state became intertwined. The child came to represent nationalism, nation-building, and the intrinsic connection between nationalism and race that was instrumental in creating a culture of white supremacy in the United States.

Reading texts by John Adams, Thomas Paine, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Augusta J. Evans, Mark Twain, Pauline Hopkins, William James, José Martí, W. E. B. Du Bois, and others, Levander traces the child as it figures in writing about several defining events for the United States. Among these are the Revolutionary War, the US-Mexican War, the Civil War, and the US expulsion of Spain from the Caribbean and Cuba. She charts how the child crystallized the concept of self—a self who could affiliate with the nation—in the early national period, and then follows the child through the rise of a school of American psychology and the period of imperialism. Demonstrating that textual representations of the child have been a potent force in shaping public opinion about race, slavery, exceptionalism, and imperialism, Cradle of Liberty shows how a powerful racial logic pervades structures of liberal democracy in the United States.

Always in the process of becoming, inherently incomplete, the child is a remarkably malleable figure. In Figurations, Claudia Castañeda shows how this malleability is itself generated—how the child is "made" by different constituencies and how the resulting historically, geographically, and culturally specific figures are put to widely divergent uses, often to very powerful effect. Situated at the intersection of feminist, postcolonial, cultural, and science and technology studies, this book provides a remarkable map of the child's meaning and movement across transnational circuits of exchange.

Castañeda investigates the construction of the child as both a natural and cultural body, the character of its embodiment, and its imaginative appeal in various settings. The sites through which she tracks the bodily production and deployment of the child include nineteenth-century developmental science; cognitive neuroscience in the late twentieth century; international adoption; rumors and media coverage of child-organ stealing; and poststructuralist theory. Her work reveals the extent to which the child's cultural significance and value lie in its status as a body whose incompleteness makes it "available" for such varied uses. Figurations establishes the child as a key figure for understanding and rethinking the politics of nature, culture, bodies, and subjects in changing "global" worlds.

How do parents allocate human capital among their children? To what extent do parental decisions about resource allocation determine children's eventual economic success?

The analyses in From Parent to Child explore these questions by developing and testing a model in which the earnings of children with different genetic endowments respond differently to investments in human capital. Behrman, Pollak, and Taubman use this model to investigate issues such as parental bias in resource allocations based on gender or birth order; the extent of intergenerational mobility in income, earnings, and schooling in the United States; the relative importance of environmental and genetic factors in determining variations in schooling; and whether parents' distributions offset the intended effects of government programs designed to subsidize children. In allocating scarce resources, parents face a trade-off between equity and efficiency, between the competing desires to equalize the wealth of their children and to maximize the sum of their earnings.

Building on the seminal work of Gary Becker, From Parent to Child integrates careful modeling of household behavior with systematic empirical testing, and will appeal to anyone interested in the economics of the family.

An inquiry into the lives of children of similar, if not identical, historical an cultural heritage who today find themselves in radically opposed ideological worlds, regarding one another across the concrete manifestation of their considerable differences, the Berlin Wall. Under these circumstances, what are the significant factors that contribute to the development in children of feelings of loyalty to or alienation from their nation? How do they view not only themselves, but the "other" Germans as well? How do they come to terms, emotionally and cognitively, with a unique, frequently painful, and frustrating reality? What are the lessons intended for them by their societies, and what lessons do they in fact learn? How do these children persist as Germans while at the same time becoming something else -- "communists? or "capitalists"?

Thomas Davey conducted interviews with children both sides of the Wall, participated in their daily lives, collected their drawings, talked with their teachers and families and grew aware of just how attentive children can be to moral and political subtleties of national life. The result is a revealing and dramatic portrait of a young generation coming to terms with complex national and historical circumstances of the two cites of East and West Berlin.

From growing their children, parents grow themselves, learning the lessons their children teach. “Growing up”, then, is as much a developmental process of parenthood as it is of childhood. While countless books have been written about the challenges of parenting, nearly all of them position the parent as instructor and support-giver, the child as learner and in need of direction. But the parent-child relationship is more complicated and reciprocal; over time it transforms in remarkable, surprising ways. As our children grow up, and we grow older, what used to be a one-way flow of instruction and support, from parent to child, becomes instead an exchange. We begin to learn from them. The lessons parents learn from their offspring—voluntarily and involuntarily, with intention and serendipity, often through resistance and struggle—are embedded in their evolving relationships and shaped by the rapidly transforming world around them.
 
With Growing Each Other Up, Macarthur Prize–winning sociologist and educator Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot offers an intimately detailed, emotionally powerful account of that experience. Building her book on a series of in-depth interviews with parents around the country, she offers a counterpoint to the usual parental development literature that mostly concerns the adjustment of parents to their babies’ rhythms and the ways parents weather the storms of their teenage progeny. The focus here is on the lessons emerging adult children, ages 15 to 35, teach their parents. How are our perspectives as parents shaped by our children? What lessons do we take from them and incorporate into our worldviews? Just how much do we learn—often despite our own emotionally fraught resistance—from what they have seen of life that we, perhaps, never experienced? From these parent portraits emerges the shape of an education composed by young adult children—an education built on witness, growing, intimacy, and acceptance.
 
Growing Each Other Up is rich in the voices of actual parents telling their own stories of raising children and their children raising them; watching that fundamental connection shift over time. Parents and children of all ages will recognize themselves in these evocative and moving accounts and look at their own growing up in a revelatory new light.
 

Many parents who have experienced the death of a child struggle with painful and at times overwhelming marital problems. Grieving can create great marital distance, and it can magnify those problems that existed before the child's death. Grieving parents often fear that divorce is a real possibility. This book can help.

Based on intensive interviews of 29 couples who experienced the death of a child, this book offers perspectives and advice on common marital problems experienced by bereaved parents. Each couple's problems are unique, but often the problems are connected to couple communication, sexuality, parenting of other children, the use of alcohol and drugs, blaming, and differences in such areas as whether to have another child, how to grieve, how to talk about the child who died, whether to go outside the marriage for support, and  what to do with things and spaces that were the child's.

Although the book deals with pain and marital distress, it offers a message of hope. Grieving parents can and  do get through the hard times, based on respect for  differences, mutual understanding, and  shared history.

This collection of articles on images of the child offers an excellent range of perspectives on an equally wide range of concerns, including advertising, girls' book series, rap music, realistic fiction, games, dolls, violence, and movies. Taken together as a book, this collection confirms the complexity of the world of childhood, and demonstrates how strongly images of the child reflect the entire culture.

An in-depth look at the challenges undocumented immigrants face as they raise children in the U.S. There are now nearly four million children born in the United States who have undocumented immigrant parents. In the current debates around immigration reform, policymakers often view immigrants as an economic or labor market problem to be solved, but the issue has a very real human dimension. Immigrant parents without legal status are raising their citizen children under stressful work and financial conditions, with the constant threat of discovery and deportation that may narrow social contacts and limit participation in public programs that might benefit their children. Immigrants Raising Citizens offers a compelling description of the everyday experiences of these parents, their very young children, and the consequences these experiences have on their children's development. Immigrants Raising Citizens challenges conventional wisdom about undocumented immigrants, viewing them not as lawbreakers or victims, but as the parents of citizens whose adult productivity will be essential to the nation's future. The book's findings are based on data from a three-year study of 380 infants from Dominican, Mexican, Chinese, and African American families, which included in-depth interviews, in-home child assessments, and parent surveys. The book shows that undocumented parents share three sets of experiences that distinguish them from legal-status parents and may adversely influence their children's development: avoidance of programs and authorities, isolated social networks, and poor work conditions. Fearing deportation, undocumented parents often avoid accessing valuable resources that could help their children's development—such as access to public programs and agencies providing child care and food subsidies. At the same time, many of these parents are forced to interact with illegal entities such as smugglers or loan sharks out of financial necessity. Undocumented immigrants also tend to have fewer reliable social ties to assist with child care or share information on child-rearing. Compared to legal-status parents, undocumented parents experience significantly more exploitive work conditions, including long hours, inadequate pay and raises, few job benefits, and limited autonomy in job duties. These conditions can result in ongoing parental stress, economic hardship, and avoidance of center-based child care—which is directly correlated with early skill development in children. The result is poorly developed cognitive skills, recognizable in children as young as two years old, which can negatively impact their future school performance and, eventually, their job prospects. Immigrants Raising Citizens has important implications for immigration policy, labor law enforcement, and the structure of community services for immigrant families. In addition to low income and educational levels, undocumented parents experience hardships due to their status that have potentially lifelong consequences for their children. With nothing less than the future contributions of these children at stake, the book presents a rigorous and sobering argument that the price for ignoring this reality may be too high to pay.

Why were theories of affect, intersubjectivity, and object relations bypassed in favor of a Lacanian linguistically oriented psychoanalysis in feminist film theory in the 1980s and 1990s? In Moral Spectatorship, Lisa Cartwright rethinks the politics of spectatorship in film studies. Returning to impasses reached in late-twentieth-century psychoanalytic film theory, she focuses attention on theories of affect and object relations seldom addressed during that period. Cartwright offers a new theory of spectatorship and the human subject that takes into account intersubjective and affective relationships and technologies facilitating human agency. Seeking to expand concepts of representation beyond the visual, she develops her theory through interpretations of two contexts in which adult caregivers help bring children to voice. She considers several social-problem melodramas about deaf and nonverbal girls and young women, including Johnny Belinda, The Miracle Worker, and Children of a Lesser God. Cartwright also analyzes the controversies surrounding facilitated communication, a technological practice in which caregivers help children with communication disorders achieve “voice” through writing facilitated by computers. This practice has inspired contempt among professionals and lay people who charge that the facilitator can manipulate the child’s speech.

For more than two decades, film theory has been dominated by a model of identification tacitly based on the idea of feeling what the other feels or of imagining oneself to be the other. Building on the theories of affect and identification developed by André Green, Melanie Klein, Donald W. Winnicott, and Silvan Tomkins, Cartwright develops a model of spectatorship that takes into account and provides a way of critically analyzing the dynamics of a different kind of identification, one that is empathetic and highly intersubjective.

Possibility and Necessity was first published in 1987. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

Jean Piaget was preoccupied, later in life, with the developing child's understanding of possibility—how the child becomes aware of the potentially unlimited scope of possible actions and learns to choose among them. Piaget's approach to this question took on a new openness to real-life situations, less deterministic than his earlier, ground-breaking work in cognitive development. The resulting two-volume work—his last—was published in France in 1981 and 1983 and is not available for the first time in English translation. Possibility and Necessity combines theoretical interpretation with detailed summaries of the experiments that Piaget and his colleagues used to test their hypotheses.

Piaget's intent, in Volume 1, is to explore the process whereby possibilities are formed. He chooses to understand "the possible" not as something predetermined by initial conditions; rather, in his use of the term, possibilities are constantly coming into being, and have no static characteristics—each arises from an event which has produced an opening onto it, and its actualization will in turn give rise to other openings. In perceiving that a possibility can be realized, and in acting upon it, the child creates something that did not exist before.

To observe this process, Piaget and his associates devised a series of thirteen problems appropriate for children ranging in age from four or five to eleven or twelve; they were asked to name all possible ways three dice might be arranged, for example, or a square of paper sectioned. The experimenters had two primary aims—to discover to what extent the child's capacity to see possibilities develops with age, and to determine the place in cognitive development of this capacity—does it precede or follow the advent of operational thought structures? In charting this process, Piaget discerns a growing interaction between possibility and necessity. How the child comes to understand necessity and achieves a dynamic synthesis—or equilibrium — between the possible and the necessary is discussed by Piaget and his colleagues in Volume 2, The Role of Necessity in Cognitive Development, also published by Minnesota.

Possibility and Necessity was first published in 1987. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

This two-volume work—Jean Piaget's last—was published in France in 1981 and 1983 and is available now for the first time in English translation. Reflecting the preoccupations and methodologies of his later years, Possibility and Necessity combines theoretical interpretation with detailed summaries of the experiments Piaget and his colleagues used to test their hypotheses.

Volume 2 presents a series of experiments documenting the way children between the ages of four or five and eleven to thirteen come to develop a grasp of necessity and its role in understanding the world about them. The experiments show how children proceed from an initial level (at four or five years) of pseudo-necessities, where they see the world as necessarily what it appears to be without the existence of other possibilities, to an intermediate level (at six to ten years), where pseudo-necessities give way to increasingly rich arrays of possibilities, and a final stage (at eleven to thirteen years), where children are able to select among these multiple possibilities the one that fits all the data. This stage represents the optimal level of understanding reality, which is now seen by the child as infinitely variable yet coherent and lawful. Psychologically, this lawfulness corresponds to a sense of necessity, or certainty.

Volume 2 thus completes the theory presented in Volume 1 (The Role of Possibility in Cognitive Development) by showing how cognitive development is mediated on the one hand by a dialectical process of ever-expanding possibilities and, on the other, by increasingly delimiting necessities. In demonstrating how this process operates in psychological development—and in pointing out analogies in the history of science — Piaget gave his genetic epistemology its final and most accomplished form. The acquisition of knowledge is thus shown to be the result of two complementary processes: the formation of possibilities and the grasping of necessary laws and constraints in the construction of a reasoned representation of the external world.

Makes a major contribution to current research on children by providing a broad view of up-to-date, authoritative material in many different areas. Contributors have selected and interpreted the relevant material in reference to the practitioner's interests and needs. The chapters, written by prominent specialists, cover various topics in child development from early periods of socialization to the development of higher mental processes, and include two chapters dealing with genetic and neurophysiological bases of behavior.

Makes a major contribution to current research on children by providing a broad view of up-to-date, authoritative material in many different areas. Contributors have selected and interpreted the relevant material in reference to the practitioner's interests and needs. The chapters, written by prominent specialists, cover various topics in child development from early periods of socialization to the development of higher mental processes, and include two chapters dealing with genetic and neurophysiological bases of behavior.

This autobiography follows West Virginia senator Robert C. Byrd’s experiences from his boyhood in the early 1920s to his election in 2000, which won him an unprecedented eighth term in the Senate. Within these pages, Senator Byrd offers commentary on national and international events that occurred throughout his long life in public service. 

His journey from the hardscrabble coalfields to the marbled halls of Congress has inspired generations of people in West Virginia and throughout the nation. From reading the stories of the Founding Fathers as a young boy by the light of a kerosene lamp to the swearing of an oath for more than a half-century to guard the US Constitution, Senator Byrd’s life is legendary. 

Until his death on June 28, 2010, Byrd stood by his principles, earning the affection of the people of his home state and the respect of Americans from all walks of life. With his beloved Erma ever by his side, Robert C. Byrd never forgot his roots, harkening back to those early lessons that he learned as a child of the Appalachian coalfields.

This new paperback edition includes a foreword by Gaston Caperton, governor of West Virginia from 1989–1997.

This autobiography follows United States Senator Robert C. Byrd’s experiences from his boyhood in the early 1920s to his election in 2000, which won him an unprecedented eighth term in the Senate. Along the way, Senator Byrd offers commentary on national and international events that occurred throughout his long life in public service. Senator Byrd’s journey from the hardscrabble coalfields to the marbled halls of Congress has inspired generations of people in West Virginia and throughout the nation. From reading the stories of the Founding Fathers as a young boy by the light of a kerosene lamp to the swearing of an oath for more than a half-century to guard the United States Constitution, Senator Byrd’s life is legendary. Byrd always stands by his principles, earning the affection of the people of his home state and the respect of Americans from all walks of life. With his beloved Erma ever by his side, Robert C. Byrd has never forgotten his roots, harkening back to those early lessons that he learned as a child of the Appalachian coalfields.

Poor design and wasted funding characterize today’s American playgrounds. A range of factors—including a litigious culture, overzealous safety guidelines, and an ethos of risk aversion—have created uniform and unimaginative playgrounds. These spaces fail to nurture the development of children or promote playgrounds as an active component in enlivening community space. Solomon’s book demonstrates how to alter the status quo by allying data with design. Recent information from the behavioral sciences indicates that kids need to take risks; experience failure but also have a chance to succeed and master difficult tasks; learn to plan and solve problems; exercise self-control; and develop friendships. Solomon illustrates how architects and landscape architects (most of whom work in Europe and Japan) have already addressed these needs with strong, successful playground designs. These innovative spaces, many of which are more multifunctional and cost effective than traditional playgrounds, are both sustainable and welcoming. Having become vibrant hubs within their neighborhoods, these play sites are models for anyone designing or commissioning an urban area for children and their families. The Science of Play, a clarion call to use playground design to deepen the American commitment to public space, will interest architects, landscape architects, urban policy makers, city managers, local politicians, and parents.

Social worker, psychoanalyst, and child-development expert Selma Fraiberg’s iconic book, The Magic Years, has influenced generations of caregivers, therapists, and clinicians since its publication in 1959. No less rich are the essays that make up this new, accessibly priced reissue of her Selected Writings.   Like The Magic Years, these essays (including her hugely influential “Ghosts in the Nursery”) glean their insights from years of clinical study and contain Fraiberg’s synthesis of and groundbreaking contributions to attachment theory, child psychology, social work, and, through her work with blind children, the experience of disability in infancy and childhood. Clinical rigor paired with attunement to the emotional lives of her subjects was Fraiberg’s hallmark: as her husband Louis writes in his preface to this volume, “Once, when asked how she knew what babies were thinking, she replied, ‘They tell me.’” Lucid and elegantly written, her Selected Writings will remain a valuable resource for new generations of social workers, mental-health professionals, educators, and others who work with young children.  

In 1969, Senator John Pastore requested that the Surgeon General appoint a committee to conduct an inquiry into television violence and its effect on children. When the Surgeon General's report was finally released in 1972—after a three-year inquiry and a cost of over $1.8 million—it angered and confused a number of critics, including politicians, the broadcast industry, many of the social scientists who had helped carry out the research, and the public. While the final consequences of the Report may not be played out for years to come, TV Violence and the Child presents a fascinating study of the Surgeon General's quest and, in effect, the process by which social science is recruited and its findings made relevant to public policy. In addition to dealing with television as an object of concern, the authors also consider the government's effectiveness when dealing with social objectives and the influence of citizen action on our communication systems. Their overwhelming conclusion is that the nation's institutions are ill-equipped for recruiting expert talent, providing clear findings, and carrying out objectives in this area of delicate human concern.

This book is an invaluable key to self-understanding. Using examples from her own life and the lives of her clients, as well as from dreams, fairy tales, myths, films, and literature, Linda Schierse Leonard, a Jungian analyst, exposes the wound of the spirit that both men and women of our culture bear—a wound that is grounded in a poor relationship between masculine and feminine principles.

Leonard speculates that when a father is wounded in his own psychological development, he is not able to give his daughter the care and guidance she needs. Inheriting this wound, she may find that her ability to express herself professionally, intellectually, sexually, and socially is impaired. On a broader scale, Leonard discusses how women compensate for cultural devaluation, resorting to passive submission (“the Eternal Girl”), or a defensive imitation of the masculine (“the Armored Amazon”).

The Wounded Woman shows that by understanding the father-daughter wound and working to transform it psychologically, it is possible to achieve a fruitful, caring relationship between men and women, between fathers and daughters, a relationship that honors both the mutuality and the uniqueness of the sexes.