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Disruptive events such as economic recessions, natural disasters, job loss, and divorce can have a long-lasting impact when experienced during childhood, potentially altering children’s academic achievement, health and development, and later socioeconomic attainment. While much research has considered the overall impact of disruptive events on children’s lives, the consequences of disruption vary across groups. The same disruptive event may have profound negative consequences for some groups, minor or no impact for others, and even present a positive turning point for other groups. In this special issue of RSF, an interdisciplinary group of experts examine the disparate consequences of disruptive events on children.
 
Drawing on accumulated insights of empirical work from several social science disciplines, including sociology, psychology, and economics, the editors provide a nuanced consideration of theoretical approaches and methodological challenges in identifying unequal impacts. They argue that variation in the effects of disruptive events depends on different, and sometimes offsetting, mechanisms. For example, Martha Bailey and colleagues find that more disadvantaged male youth were less negatively impacted by the macroeconomic shock of the Great Depression than more advantaged youth. Black youth, however, were more negatively impacted. Anna Baranowska-Rataj and colleagues find little evidence that parental job loss leads to worse birth outcomes or that effects vary across regions with different unemployment levels in Sweden, a nation with a relatively generous safety net and universal health care. Regarding the household disruption of parental incarceration, Kristin Turney and colleagues find that some children seamlessly step into new responsibilities, while others, especially older children who had witnessed their fathers’ frequent entanglements with the criminal legal system, consciously step away from these responsibilities. Stefanie DeLuca and colleagues argue that as youth grow accustomed to disruptive events, these exposures become less remarkable and impactful on their life outcomes. Looking at the disruption to education caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, Douglas Harris and colleagues find that \high school graduation has remained remarkably steady since the onset of the pandemic, but entry into two-year colleges was hard hit, especially for colleges serving more people of color and those from low-income families. Finally, considering environmental disruptions, Nazar Khalid and colleagues show that severe floods in India have a stronger impact on the educational outcomes of children from marginalized communities.
 
Through its systematic examination of the variation in the consequences of disruption, especially in early life, this volume of RSF provides an insightful and practical resource for both researchers and policymakers.
 
 

The Credible Messenger Mentoring Initiative (CMMI), launched in New York City in 2012, is a transformative program where adults who had been in the justice system serve as mentors, role models, and life coaches for 16- to 24-year-olds. The program socializes and empowers these at-risk and formerly incarcerated youth offenders, diverting them from juvenile justice institutions and rehabilitation centers. It aims to build trust, deepen their ties to their community and family, and help them become peacemakers and role models for other youths.

Real Recognizes Real is the first in-depth study of the CMMI, focusing on the Washington, DC branch of the program, which is becoming a model for a new movement of anti-violent interventions. It shows the advantages of the CMMI being built on the love that members of a community have for one another rather than on outside intervention. The authors also explain how this state-run, non-profit program reduced recidivism rates and helped its participants, youth and mentors alike, develop more meaningful and lasting relationships.

Featuring interviews with youths and their mentors, Real Recognizes Real evaluates the successes, challenges, failures, and lessons of the CMMI, while emphasizing its value in the campaign for juvenile justice reform.

In the series Studies in Transgression

Resilience is more than survival—Wendy Sims-Schouten amplifies the resistant and transformative voices of marginalized and displaced children across history.

Revisiting Childhood Resilience Through Marginalised and Displaced Voices resists the way we think about resilience, shifting the focus from personal perseverance to the lived realities of children and young people pushed to society’s margins. Wendy Sims-Schouten moves beyond the familiar idea of resilience as individual grit, instead exploring how defiance and even compliance emerge as survival strategies for care leavers, bullied youth, ethnic minorities, and those with histories of migration and displacement.

Spanning one hundred and fifty years of personal and collective histories, this book brings together interdisciplinary research co-produced with those too often left out of resilience studies. By centering their voices, it unveils how resilience is shaped not just by inner strength, but by systemic barriers and the availability of support. Revisiting Childhood Resilience calls on policymakers and practitioners to rethink resilience as something far more complex than an individual trait; a process deeply rooted in context and agency.

Holy adolescence, Batman! Robin and the Making of American Adolescence offers the first character history and analysis of the most famous superhero sidekick, Robin. Debuting just a few months after Batman himself, Robin has been an integral part of the Dark Knight’s history—and debuting just a few months prior to the word “teenager” first appearing in print, Robin has from the outset both reflected and reinforced particular images of American adolescence. Closely reading several characters who have “played” Robin over the past eighty years, Robin and the Making of American Adolescence reveals the Boy (and sometimes Girl!) Wonder as a complex figure through whom mainstream culture has addressed anxieties about adolescents in relation to sexuality, gender, and race. This book partners up comics studies and adolescent studies as a new Dynamic Duo, following Robin as he swings alongside the ever-changing American teenager and finally shining the Bat-signal on the latter half of “Batman and—.”