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The Art of Play
Recess and the Practice of Invention
Anna Beresin
Temple University Press, 2013

What can the art of play teach us about the art of play? Showcasing the paintings of more than one hundred Philadelphia public elementary school children, folklorist Anna Beresin’s innovative book,  The Art of Play, presents images and stories that illustrate what children do at recess, and how it makes them feel.

Beresin provides a nuanced, child-centered discussion of the intersections of play, art, and learning. She describes a widespread institutionalized fear of play and expressive art, and the transformative power of simple materials like chalk and paint. Featuring more than 150 paintings and a dozen surreal photographs of masked children enjoying recess, The Art of Play weaves together the diverse voices of kids and working artists with play scholarship.

This book emerged from Recess Access, a service-learning project that donated chalk, ropes, balls, and hoops to nine schools in different sections of Philadelphia. A portion of the proceeds of The Art of Play will support recess advocacy.

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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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Bad Guys Don't Have Birthdays
Fantasy Play at Four
Vivian Gussin Paley
University of Chicago Press, 1991
Bad guys are not allowed to have birthdays, pick blueberries, or disturb the baby. So say the four-year-olds who announce life's risks and dangers as they play out the school year in Vivian Paley's classroom.

Their play is filled with warnings. They invent chaos in order to show that everything is under control. They portray fear to prove that it can be conquered. No theme is too large or too small for their intense scrutiny. Fantasy play is their ever dependable pathway to knowledge and certainty.

" It . . . takes a special teacher to value the young child's communications sufficiently, enter into a meaningful dialogue with the youngster, and thereby stimulate more productivity without overwhelming the child with her own ideas. Vivian Paley is such a teacher."—Maria W. Piers, in the American Journal of Education

"[Mrs. Paley's books] should be required reading wherever children are growing. Mrs. Paley does not presume to understand preschool children, or to theorize. Her strength lies equally in knowing that she does not know and in trying to learn. When she cannot help children—because she can neither anticipate nor follow their thinking—she strives not to hinder them. She avoids the arrogance of adult to small child; of teacher to student; or writer to reader."—Penelope Leach, author of Your Baby & Child in the New York Times Book Review

"[Paley's] stories and interpretation argue for a new type of early childhood education . . . a form of teaching that builds upon the considerable knowledge children already have and grapple with daily in fantasy play."—Alex Raskin, Los Angeles Times Book Review

"Through the 'intuitive language' of fantasy play, Paley believes, children express their deepest concerns. They act out different roles and invent imaginative scenarios to better understand the real world. Fantasy play helps them cope with uncomfortable feelings. . . . In fantasy, any device may be used to draw safe boundaries."—Ruth J. Moss, Psychology Today
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Between Self and Community
Children’s Personhood in a Globalized South Korea
Junehui Ahn
Rutgers University Press, 2023
Between Self and Community investigates the early childhood socialization process in a rapidly changing, globalizing South Korea. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in a South Korean preschool, it shows how both children and teachers interactively navigate, construct, and reconstruct their own multifaceted and sometimes conflicting models of what makes “a good child” amid Korea’s shifting educational and social contexts. Junehui Ahn details the conflicting and competing ways in which the ideologies of new personhood are enacted in actual everyday socialization contexts and reveals the confusions, dilemmas, and ruptures that occur when globally dominant ideals of childhood development are superimposed onto local experiences. Between Self and Community pays special attention to the way children, as active agents of socialization, create, construe, and sustain their own meanings of their personhood, thereby highlighting the dynamism children and their culturally rich peer world create in South Korea’s shifting socialization terrain.  
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The Boy Who Would Be a Helicopter
Vivian Gussin Paley
Harvard University Press, 1991

How does a teacher begin to appreciate and tap the rich creative resources of the fantasy world of children? What social functions do story playing and storytelling serve in the preschool classroom? And how can the child who is trapped in private fantasies be brought into the richly imaginative social play that surrounds him?

The Boy Who Would Be a Helicopter focuses on the challenge posed by the isolated child to teachers and classmates alike in the unique community of the classroom. It is the dramatic story of Jason—the loner and outsider—and of his ultimate triumph and homecoming into the society of his classmates. As we follow Jason’s struggle, we see that the classroom is indeed the crucible within which the young discover themselves and learn to confront new problems in their daily experience.

Vivian Paley recreates the stage upon which children emerge as natural and ingenious storytellers. She supplements these real-life vignettes with brilliant insights into the teaching process, offering detailed discussions about control, authority, and the misuse of punishment in the preschool classroom. She shows a more effective and natural dynamic of limit-setting that emerges in the control children exert over their own fantasies. And here for the first time the author introduces a triumvirate of teachers (Paley herself and two apprentices) who reflect on the meaning of events unfolding before them.

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Boys and Girls
Superheroes in the Doll Corner
Vivian Gussin Paley
University of Chicago Press, 2014
With the publication of Boys and Girls in 1984, Vivian Gussin Paley took readers inside a kindergarten classroom to show them 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. Thirty years later, the superheroes and princesses are still here, but their doll corners and block areas are fast disappearing from our kindergartens. This new edition of Paley’s classic book reignites issues that are more important than ever for a new generation of students, parents, and teachers.
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Boys and Girls
Superheroes in the Doll Corner
Vivian Gussin Paley
University of Chicago Press, 1984
"Paley has a sharp ear for the rhythm and inflections of childhood. Her vignettes give us a revealing glimpse into children's inner lives, and her discussion of her own discomfort with boy's play and approval of that of girls raises and important issue."—Carole Wade, Psychology Today

"I will admit my biases up front: having a three-year old daughter of my own made it impossible for this book to be anything but fun to read. I dare anyone who enjoys children not to enjoy this story about stories, this narrative about narratives."—Jerry Powell, Winterthur Portfolio
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Childhood in a Sri Lankan Village
Shaping Hierarchy and Desire
Chapin, Bambi L
Rutgers University Press, 2014
Like toddlers all over the world, Sri Lankan children go through a period that in the U.S. is referred to as the “terrible twos.” Yet once they reach elementary school age, they appear uncannily passive, compliant, and undemanding compared to their Western counterparts. Clearly, these children have undergone some process of socialization, but what?

Over ten years ago, anthropologist Bambi Chapin traveled to a rural Sri Lankan village to begin answering this question, getting to know the toddlers in the village, then returning to track their development over the course of the following decade. Childhood in a Sri Lankan Village offers an intimate look at how these children, raised on the tenets of Buddhism, are trained to set aside selfish desires for the good of their families and the community. Chapin reveals how this cultural conditioning is carried out through small everyday practices, including eating and sleeping arrangements, yet she also explores how the village’s attitudes and customs continue to evolve with each new generation.

Combining penetrating psychological insights with a rigorous observation of larger social structures, Chapin enables us to see the world through the eyes of Sri Lankan children searching for a place within their families and communities. Childhood in a Sri Lankan Village offers a fresh, global perspective on child development and the transmission of culture.    
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Children of the Kibbutz
A Study in Child Training and Personality, Revised Edition
Melford E. Spiro
Harvard University Press, 1975

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Children with Autism
A Developmental Perspective
Marian Sigman and Lisa Capps
Harvard University Press, 1997

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.

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Children’s Friendships
Zick Rubin
Harvard University Press, 1980

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.

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Children’s Friendships
Zick Rubin
Harvard University Press, 1980

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The Competitive Ethos and Democratic Education
John G. Nicholls
Harvard University Press, 1989

Young children and even infants work hard at mastering various kills and show spontaneous pleasure at their own accomplishment. John Nicholls explores the conditions that cause students to lose their unselfconscious involvement in a game or task and become concerned with how they are stacking up against others. Charting the development of children’s concepts of luck, effort, and ability, he argues that with age they are increasingly prone to take superiority over others as the definition of success. An emphasis on interpersonal competition, which permeates Western society, exacerbates this egotistical tendency and results in diminished accomplishment and alienation from school.

To overcome these problems, Nicholls argues, we must “become as little children” for whom absorption in exploration and accomplishment come naturally, even when those around them are more competent. This ideal is unlikely to be promoted through technical approaches to education, or by the current emphasis on the role of education in economic development. Instead, Nicholls calls for a progressive approach to education. Difficult though it is to implement, this approach is most likely to increase equality of motivation for intellectual development, substantial accomplishment, satisfaction in work, and more productive relations with others. These are important ideas for anyone interested in achievement motivation, for those professionally involved in education, and for nonspecialists interested in, or worried about, how we educate our children.

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Context, Cognition, and Deafness
M. Diane Clark
Gallaudet University Press, 2001
In past studies of the effect of environment and social settings upon the cognitive development of deaf children, results frequently were confounded by conflicting conclusions related to the particpants' varying degrees of hearing loss. Context, Cognition, and Deafness: An Introduction takes an interdisciplinary approach that clarifies these disparate findings by analyzing many methodologies. Editors M. Diane Clark, Marc Marschark, and Michael Karchmer, widely respected scholars in their own right, have assembled work by a varying cast of renowned researchers to elucidate the effects of family, peers, and schools on deaf children. To integrate the often contrasting approaches of clinical and cultural researchers, this sharply focused volume has called upon experts in anthropology, psychology, linguistics, basic visual sensory processes, education, cognition, and neurophysiology to share complementary observations. One of William C. Stokoe's last contributions, "Deafness, Cognition, and Language" leads fluidly into Jeffrey P. Praden's analysis of clinical assessments of deaf people's cognitive abilities. Margaret Wilson expands on the impace of sign language expertise on visual perception. Context, Cognition, and Deafness also shows that theory can intersect practice, as displayed by editor Marschark and Jennifer Lukomski in their research on literacy, cognition, and education. Amy R. Lederberg and Patricia E. Spencer have combined sequential designs in their study of vocabulary learning. Ethan Remmel, Jeffrey G. Bettger, and Amy M. Weinberg explore the theory of mind development. The emotional development of deaf children also received detailed consideration by Colin D. Gray, Judith A. Hosie, Phil A. Russell, and Ellen A. Ormel. Kathryn P. Meadow-Orlans delineates her perspective on the coming of age of deaf children in relation to their education and development. Marschark concludes with insightful impressions on the future of theory and application, an appropriate close to this exceptional, coherent volume. M. Diane Clark is Professor in the Department of Psychology at Shippensburg University in Shippensburg, PA. Marc Marschark is Professor in the Department of Research at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf in Rochester, NY. Michael Karchmer is Professor in the Department of Education Foundations and Research and Director of the Gallaudet Research Institute at Gallaudet University.
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Daycare
Revised Edition
Alison Clarke-Stewart
Harvard University Press, 1993

There are eight million preschoolers whose mothers now work, most of them because of economic necessity. For these mothers the question is not whether to use daycare, but how to choose among the available options in a way that is best for the child. These are just the questions taken up in Daycare, a brief and readable summary of the best information modern “baby science” has to offer about how daycare affects young children and how to tell the difference between daycare that helps and daycare that hurts.

On the basis of her own research and a complete review of the most recent daycare studies, Alison Clarke-Stewart concludes that good daycare definitely does not impair the child's development either emotionally or intellectually. Fears that daycare children will fail to develop proper parental attachments and will cling instead to their peers are unfounded; so too are fears that mental growth will be slowed. In fact, there is some evidence that social and intellectual development can be facilitated in good daycare environments. The real question is just what these environments are made of, and here Daycare provides a complete discussion of the necessary ingredients, including a checklist that parents can use to make their own evaluation of any daycare arrangement.

This is a book that covers all the practical problems daycare parents must face and suggests ways to solve them that are based not on psychological theory or political conviction but on the facts as we now know them.

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Developmental Programming for Infants and Young Children
Volume 1. Assessment and Application
D. Sue Schafer and Martha S. Moersch, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 1981

Developmental Programming for Infants and Young Children: Volume 1 provides detailed instructions for the use of Volume 2: Early Intervention Developmental Profile, including administration and evaluation techniques, scoring and interpretation of results, validity and reliability of findings, and complete item descriptions. To be used with children functioning in the 0-to-36-month developmental age range. Volume 1 includes the scoring sheet (Volume 2).

Developmental Programming for Infants and Young Children

In Five Volumes

Developmental Programming for Infants and Young Children has proven to be an invaluable tool for teachers, therapists, and other professionals who assess and facilitate the development of children functioning primarily in the 0-to-60 month range. The authors address six areas of development: perceptual/fine motor, cognition, language, social/emotional, self-care, and gross motor. Volumes 1, 2, and 3 are designed for use with children functioning in the 0-to-36-month developmental age range, while Volumes 4 and 5 extend assessment and programming guidelines to 5-year (preschool) levels.

Carefully designed and tested by the University of Michigan's Institute for the Study of Mental Retardation and Related Disabilities, all volumes bridge the gap between assessment and program implementation.

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Discovering Successful Pathways in Children's Development
Mixed Methods in the Study of Childhood and Family Life
Edited by Thomas S. Weisner
University of Chicago Press, 2005
Discovering Successful Pathways in Children's Development provides a new perspective on the study of childhood and family life. Successful development is enhanced when communities provide meaningful life pathways that children can seek out and engage.  Successful pathways include both a culturally valued direction for development and competence in skills that matter for a child's subsequent success as a person as well as a student, parent, worker, or citizen. To understand successful pathways requires a mix of qualitative, quantitative, and ethnographic methods—the state of the art for research practice among developmentalists, educators, and policymakers alike.

This volume includes new studies of minority and immigrant families, school achievement, culture, race and gender, poverty, identity, and experiments and interventions meant to improve family and child contexts. Discovering Successful Pathways in Children's Development will be of enormous value to everyone interested in the issues of human development, education, and social welfare, and among professionals charged with the task of improving the lives of children in our communities.
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The Evolution of Childhood
Relationships, Emotion, Mind
Melvin Konner
Harvard University Press, 2011

This book is an intellectual tour de force: a comprehensive Darwinian interpretation of human development. Looking at the entire range of human evolutionary history, Melvin Konner tells the compelling and complex story of how cross-cultural and universal characteristics of our growth from infancy to adolescence became rooted in genetically inherited characteristics of the human brain.

All study of our evolution starts with one simple truth: human beings take an extraordinarily long time to grow up. What does this extended period of dependency have to do with human brain growth and social interactions? And why is play a sign of cognitive complexity, and a spur for cultural evolution? As Konner explores these questions, and topics ranging from bipedal walking to incest taboos, he firmly lays the foundations of psychology in biology.

As his book eloquently explains, human learning and the greatest human intellectual accomplishments are rooted in our inherited capacity for attachments to each other. In our love of those we learn from, we find our way as individuals and as a species. Never before has this intersection of the biology and psychology of childhood been so brilliantly described.

"Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution," wrote Dobzhansky. In this remarkable book, Melvin Konner shows that nothing in childhood makes sense except in the light of evolution.

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Fathers
Ross Parke
Harvard University Press, 1981

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Language Acquisition after Puberty
Judith R. Strozer
Georgetown University Press, 1994

Bridging the gap between theoretical linguistics and language teaching, Judith R. Strozer explores what recent theoretical advances suggest about learning a language after childhood and the implications for the design and execution of a foreign language program. Strozer outlines clearly, in nontechnical language, the major concepts of modern language theory, from Chomsky's theory of language through the most recent discoveries about the abstract foundations of language. She explains ideas about the evolution of a cognitive structure for language in the human brain, a "language faculty" or Universal Grammar that gives humans alone the creative ability to generate the infinite expressions of language. This innate universal schema for language endows humankind with a number a very broad principles applicable to all languages.

Turning to current advances in the theory of phrase structure, which has replaced our 2,000-year-old rules of grammar with highly abstract universal principles of language structure, she relates the latest discoveries about the foundations of language to ideas about how children learn languages. A child hearing a specific language can automatically set the parameters for the rules governing that particular language, much like setting a binary switch. But our ability to access this innate language mechanism automatically seems limited to childhood, until physical maturity somehow changes this brain function.

Arguing that adults need to learn consciously the systems and structures of another language that children acquire unconsciously, Strozer applies these latest theories about the nature of language and how we learn it to the design of foreign language programs for adults. She concludes with recommendations for developing a new kind of teaching program that would draw on comparative language research and include new pedagogic approaches.

Presenting state-of-the-art language theory in easily readable terms and illustrative examples, this book will be of interest to everyone interested in the latest understanding of the relationship between the brain and language, as well as to all professionals in linguistics and language education.

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Making It Work
Low-Wage Employment, Family Life, and Child Development
Hirokazu Yoshikawa
Russell Sage Foundation, 2006
Low-skilled women in the 1990s took widely different paths in trying to support their children. Some held good jobs with growth potential, some cycled in and out of low-paying jobs, some worked part time, and others stayed out of the labor force entirely. Scholars have closely analyzed the economic consequences of these varied trajectories, but little research has focused on the consequences of a mother's career path on her children's development. Making It Work, edited by Hirokazu Yoshikawa, Thomas Weisner, and Edward Lowe, looks past the economic statistics to illustrate how different employment trajectories affect the social and emotional lives of poor women and their children. Making It Work examines Milwaukee's New Hope program, an experiment testing the effectiveness of an anti-poverty initiative that provided health and child care subsidies, wage supplements, and other services to full-time low-wage workers. Employing parent surveys, teacher reports, child assessment measures, ethnographic studies, and state administrative records, Making It Work provides a detailed picture of how a mother's work trajectory affects her, her family, and her children's school performance, social behavior, and expectations for the future. Rashmita Mistry and Edward D. Lowe find that increases in a mother's income were linked to higher school performance in her children. Without large financial worries, mothers gained extra confidence in their ability to parent, which translated into better test scores and higher teacher appraisals for their children. JoAnn Hsueh finds that the children of women with erratic work schedules and non-standard hours—conditions endemic to the low-skilled labor market—exhibited higher levels of anxiety and depression. Conversely, Noemi Enchautegui-de-Jesus, Hirokazu Yoshikawa, and Vonnie McLoyd discover that better job quality predicted lower levels of acting-out and withdrawal among children. Perhaps most surprisingly, Anna Gassman-Pines, Hirokazu Yoshikawa, and Sandra Nay note that as wages for these workers rose, so did their marriage rates, suggesting that those worried about family values should also be concerned with alleviating poverty in America. It is too simplistic to say that parental work is either "good" or "bad" for children. Making It Work gives a nuanced view of how job quality, flexibility, and wages are of the utmost importance for the well-being of low-income parents and children.
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Messages From Home
The Parent-Child Home Program For Overcoming Educational Disadvantage
Phyllis Levenstein and Susan Levenstein
Temple University Press, 2008

The Parent-Child Home Program, a pre-preschool home visiting program, has grown greatly since the first edition of Messages from Home was published in 1988. This expanded and updated edition shows the continued success of this program-spearheaded by the late Phyllis Levenstein-which prepares at-risk children for school success, overcoming educational disadvantage.

Since The Parent-Child Home Program was founded in the 1960s, it has enriched the cognitive, social, and emotional school readiness of tens of thousands of children. The Program's methods, its theoretical underpinnings, and its impressive results are presented in detail. The success stories of both parents and children make inspiring reading. The combination of lively writing and data-driven scientific rigor give it both broad appeal and academic relevance.

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Mind and Media
The Effects of Television, Video Games, and Computers
Patricia Marks Greenfield
Harvard University Press, 1984

Video games, television, and computers are facts of life for today's children. Anxious parents and teachers, concerned with maintaining the intellectual and social richness of childhood, need to understand their effects. Are we producing a generation of passive children who can't read, who require constant visual and aural stimulation, and who prefer the company of technical instruments to friends and family?

Greenfield believes that to answer this question we should not cling to old and elitist assumptions about the value of literacy. Instead she urges that we explore the results of the new research to discover how the various media can be used to promote social growth and thinking skills. She finds that each medium can make a contribution to development, that each has strengths and weaknesses, and that the ideal childhood environment includes a multimedia approach to learning.

Current studies show us, for example, that television may indeed hinder reading ability under some circumstances. Yet it may also be used to enhance and motivate reading. Television can foster visual literacy, teaching children how to interpret close-ups, zooms, and cutting, and beyond this, how to pick up visual details, orient oneself in space, and anticipate formats and patterns of behavior. Video games teach spatial skills and inductive thinking, and classroom computers, contrary to the popular stereotype, encourage cooperative enterprise.

Timely and optimistic, Mind and Media is filled with unexpected conclusions and practical suggestions for helping our children to thrive in a technological world.

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Mollie Is Three
Growing Up in School
Vivian Gussin Paley
University of Chicago Press, 1986
"No adult can escape the adult perspective; but simply recognizing its inevitable limitations in a children's world enables a few gifted educators to accept the existence and validity of whole kindergartens full of different perspectives. One such person is Vivian Gussin Paley. . . . Her books. . .should be required reading wherever children are growing."—New York Times Book Review

"With a delightful, almost magical touch, Paley shares her observations and insights about three-year-olds. The use of a tape recorder in the classroom gives her a second chance to hear students' thoughts from the doll corner to the playground, and to reflect on the ways in which young children make sense of the experience of school. . . . Paley lets the children speak for themselves, and through their words we reenter the world of the child in all its fantasy and inventiveness."—Harvard Educational Review

"Paley's vivid and accurate descriptions depict both spontaneous and recurring incidents and outline increasingly complex interactions among the children. Included in the narrative are questions or ideas to challenge the reader to gain more insight and understanding into the motives and conceptualizations of Mollie and other children."—Karen L. Peterson, Young Children
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Monitoring Child Health in the United States
Selected Issues and Policies
Deborah Klein Walker
Harvard University Press, 1984

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The Origins of You
How Childhood Shapes Later Life
Jay Belsky, Avshalom Caspi, Terrie E. Moffitt, and Richie Poulton
Harvard University Press, 2020

A Marginal Revolution Book of the Year

After tracking the lives of thousands of people from birth to midlife, four of the world’s preeminent psychologists reveal what they have learned about how humans develop.

Does temperament in childhood predict adult personality? What role do parents play in shaping how a child matures? Is day care bad—or good—for children? Does adolescent delinquency forecast a life of crime? Do genes influence success in life? Is health in adulthood shaped by childhood experiences? In search of answers to these and similar questions, four leading psychologists have spent their careers studying thousands of people, observing them as they’ve grown up and grown older. The result is unprecedented insight into what makes each of us who we are.

In The Origins of You, Jay Belsky, Avshalom Caspi, Terrie Moffitt, and Richie Poulton share what they have learned about childhood, adolescence, and adulthood, about genes and parenting, and about vulnerability, resilience, and success. The evidence shows that human development is not subject to ironclad laws but instead is a matter of possibilities and probabilities—multiple forces that together determine the direction a life will take. A child’s early years do predict who they will become later in life, but they do so imperfectly. For example, genes and troubled families both play a role in violent male behavior, and, though health and heredity sometimes go hand in hand, childhood adversity and severe bullying in adolescence can affect even physical well-being in midlife.

Painstaking and revelatory, the discoveries in The Origins of You promise to help schools, parents, and all people foster well-being and ameliorate or prevent developmental problems.

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Parents and Peers in Social Development
A Sullivan-Piaget Perspective
James Youniss
University of Chicago Press, 1980
Most studies of social development in children have relied on the assumption that adults' instructions to children pass on knowledge of the rules of behavior which govern and preserve society. In this volume, James Youniss argues that the child's relations with his or her friends and peers make a distinctive and critically important contribution to social development. While the child's relations with parents and other adults provide a sense of order and authority, peer relations are a source of sensitivity, self-understanding, and interpersonal cooperation.

Following a discussion of the views of Harry Stack Sullivan and Jean Piaget, whose theories are synthesized in Youniss's perspective, Youniss presents a wealth of empirical data from studies in which children describe their own views of their two social worlds.
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The Protestant Temperament
Patterns of Child-Rearing, Religious Experience, and the Self in Early America
Philip Greven
University of Chicago Press, 1988
Bringing together an extraordinary richness of evidence—from letters, diaries, and other intimate family records of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—Philip Greven explores the strikingly distinctive ways in which Protestant children were reared in America. In tracing the hidden continuities of religious experience, of attitudes toward God, children, the self, sexuality, pleasure, virtue, and achievement, Greven identifies three distinct Protestant temperaments prevailing among Americans at the time: the Evangelical, the Moderate, and the General. The Protestant Temperament is a powerful reassessment of the role of child-rearing and religion in early American life.
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The Queer Aesthetics of Childhood
Asymmetries of Innocence and the Cultural Politics of Child Development
Hannah Dyer
Rutgers University Press, 2020
2020 Choice​ Outstanding Academic Title

In The Queer Aesthetics of Childhood, Hannah Dyer offers a study of how children’s art and art about childhood can forecast new models of social life that redistribute care, belonging, and political value. Dyer suggests that childhood’s cultural expressions offer insight into the persisting residues of colonial history, nation building, homophobia, and related violence. Drawing from queer and feminist theory, psychoanalysis, settler-colonial studies, and cultural studies, this book helps to explain how some theories of childhood can hurt children. Dyer’s analysis moves between diverse sites and scales, including photographs and an art installation, children’s drawings after experiencing war in Gaza, a novel about gay love and childhood trauma, and debates in sex-education. In the cultural formations of art, she finds new theories of childhood that attend to the knowledge, trauma, fortitude and experience that children might possess. In addressing aggressions against children, ambivalences towards child protection, and the vital contributions children make to transnational politics, she seeks new and queer theories of childhood.
 
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Revolutions at Home
The Origin of Modern Childhood and the German Middle Class
Emily C. Bruce
University of Massachusetts Press, 2021
How did we come to imagine what "ideal childhood" requires? Beginning in the late eighteenth century, German child-rearing radically transformed, and as these innovations in ideology and educational practice spread from middle-class families across European society, childhood came to be seen as a life stage critical to self-formation. This new approach was in part a process that adults imposed on youth, one that hinged on motivating children's behavior through affection and cultivating internal discipline. But this is not just a story about parents' and pedagogues' efforts to shape childhood. Offering rare glimpses of young students' diaries, letters, and marginalia, Emily C. Bruce reveals how children themselves negotiated these changes.

Revolutions at Home analyzes a rich set of documents created for and by young Germans to show that children were central to reinventing their own education between 1770 and 1850. Through their reading and writing, they helped construct the modern child subject. The active child who emerged at this time was not simply a consequence of expanding literacy but, in fact, a key participant in defining modern life.
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front cover of The School and Society and The Child and the Curriculum
The School and Society and The Child and the Curriculum
John Dewey
University of Chicago Press, 1990
This edition brings Dewey's educational theory into sharp focus, framing his two classic works by frank assessments, past and present, of the practical applications of Dewey's ideas. In addition to a substantial introduction in which Philip W. Jackson explains why more of Dewey's ideas haven't been put into practice, this edition restores a "lost" chapter, dropped from the book by Dewey in 1915.
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The Science of Play
How to Build Playgrounds That Enhance Children's Development
Susan G. Solomon
University Press of New England, 2014
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.
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Teaching Embodied
Cultural Practice in Japanese Preschools
Akiko Hayashi and Joseph Tobin
University of Chicago Press, 2015
When we look beyond lesson planning and curricula—those explicit facets that comprise so much of our discussion about education—we remember that teaching is an inherently social activity, shaped by a rich array of implicit habits, comportments, and ways of communicating. This is as true in the United States as it is in Japan, where Akiko Hayashi and Joseph Tobin have long studied early education from a cross-cultural perspective. Taking readers inside the classrooms of Japanese preschools, Teaching Embodied explores the everyday, implicit behaviors that form a crucially important—but grossly understudied—aspect of educational practice.
           
Akiko Hayashi and Joseph Tobin embed themselves in the classrooms of three different teachers at three different schools to examine how teachers act, think, and talk. Drawing on extended interviews, their own real-time observations, and hours of video footage, they focus on how teachers embody their lessons: how they use their hands to gesture, comfort, or discipline; how they direct their posture, gaze, or physical location to indicate degrees of attention; and how they use the tone of their voice to communicate empathy, frustration, disapproval, or enthusiasm. Comparing teachers across schools and over time, they offer an illuminating analysis of the gestures that comprise a total body language, something that, while hardly ever explicitly discussed, the teachers all share to a remarkable degree. Showcasing the tremendous importance of—and dearth of attention to—this body language, they offer a powerful new inroad into educational study and practice, a deeper understanding of how teaching actually works, no matter what culture or country it is being practiced in. 
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front cover of The Vulnerable Age Phenomenon
The Vulnerable Age Phenomenon
Michael Inbar
Russell Sage Foundation, 1976
A volume in the Social Science Frontiers series, which are occasional publications reviewing new fields for social science development. These occasional publications seek to summarize recent work being done in particular areas of social research, to review new developments in the field, and to indicate issues needing further investigation. The publications are intended to help orient those concerned with developing current research programs and broadening the use of social science in the policy-making process. A Volume in the Russell Sage Foundation's Social Science Frontiers Series
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What Children Need
Jane Waldfogel
Harvard University Press, 2010
What do children need to grow and develop? And how can their needs be met when parents work? Emphasizing the importance of parental choice, quality of care, and work opportunities, economist Jane Waldfogel guides readers through the maze of social science research evidence to offer comprehensive answers and a vision for change. Drawing on the evidence, Waldfogel proposes a bold new plan to better meet the needs of children in working families, from birth through adolescence, while respecting the core values of choice, quality, and work:,Allow parents more flexibility to take time off work for family responsibilities;,Break the link between employment and essential family benefits;,Give mothers and fathers more options to stay home in the first year of life;,Improve quality of care from infancy through the preschool years;,Increase access to high-quality out-of-school programs for school-aged children and teenagers.
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front cover of What We Know about Childcare
What We Know about Childcare
Alison Clarke-Stewart and Virginia D. Allhusen
Harvard University Press, 2005

Nearly three-quarters of American mothers work full- or part-time--usually out of financial necessity--and require regular child care. How do such arrangements affect children? If they are not at home with their mothers, will they be badly behaved, intellectually delayed, or emotionally stunted?

Backed by the best current research, Alison Clarke-Stewart and Virginia Allhusen bring a reassuring answer to parents' fears and offer guidance for making difficult decisions. Quality child care, they show, may be even more beneficial to children than staying at home. Although children who spend many hours in care may be unruly compared with children at home, those who attend quality programs tend to be cognitively ahead of their peers. They are just as attached to their mothers and reap the additional benefits of engaging with other children.

Ultimately, it's parents who matter most; what happens at home makes the difference in how children develop. And today's working mothers actually spend more time interacting with their children than stay-at-home mothers did a generation ago.

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front cover of A World of Many
A World of Many
Ontology and Child Development among the Maya of Southern Mexico
Norbert Ross
Rutgers University Press, 2023
A World of Many explores the world-making efforts of Tzotzil Maya children from two different localities within the municipality of Chenalhó, Chiapas. The research demonstrates children’s agency in creating their worlds, while also investigating the role played by the surrounding social and physical environment. Different experiences with schooling, parenting, goals and values, but also with climate change, water scarcity, as well as racism and settler colonialism form part of the reason children create their emerging worlds. These worlds are not make believe or anything less than the ontological products of their parents. Instead, Norbert Ross argues that by creating different worlds, the children ultimately fashion themselves into different human beings - quite literally being different in the world. A World of Many combines experimental research from the cognitive sciences with critical theory, exploring children’s agency in devising their own ontologies. Rather than treating children as somewhat incomplete humans, it understands children as tinkerers and thinkers, makers of their worlds amidst complex relations. It regards being as a constant ontological production, where life and living constitutes activism. Using experimental paradigms, the book shows that children locate themselves differently in these emerging worlds they create, becoming different human beings in the process.
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