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267 books match the query 'Children' and 17 start with s

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Saving International Adoption

An Argument from Economics and Personal Experience

Mark Montgomery

Vanderbilt University Press, 2018

Choice Outstanding Academic Title of 2018

International adoption is in a state of virtual collapse, rates having fallen by more than half since 2004 and continuing to fall. Yet around the world millions of orphaned and vulnerable children need permanent homes, and thousands of American and European families are eager to take them in. Many government officials, international bureaucrats, and social commentators claim these adoptions are not "in the best interests" of the child. They claim that adoption deprives children of their "birth culture," threatens their racial identities, and even encourages widespread child trafficking. Celebrity adopters are publicly excoriated for stealing children from their birth families.

This book argues that opposition to adoption ostensibly based on the well-being of the child is often a smokescreen for protecting national pride. Concerns about the harm done by transracial adoption are largely inconsistent with empirical evidence. As for trafficking, opponents of international adoption want to shut it down because it is too much like a market for children. But this book offers a radical challenge to this view—that is, what if instead of trying to suppress market forces in international adoption, we embraced them so they could be properly regulated? What if the international system functioned more like open adoption in the United States, where birth and adoptive parents can meet and privately negotiate the exchange of parental rights? This arrangement, the authors argue, could eliminate the abuses that currently haunt international adoption.

The authors challenge the prevailing wisdom with their economic analyses and provocative analogies from other policy realms. Based on their own family's experience with the adoption process, they also write frankly about how that process feels for parents and children.

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Saving Sickly Children

The Tuberculosis Preventorium in American Life, 1909-1970

Connolly, Cynthia A

Rutgers University Press, 2008

Known as "The Great Killer" and "The White Plague," few diseases influenced American life as much as tuberculosis. Sufferers migrated to mountain or desert climates believed to ameliorate symptoms. Architects designed homes with sleeping porches and verandas so sufferers could spend time in the open air. The disease even developed its own consumer culture complete with invalid beds, spittoons, sputum collection devices, and disinfectants. The "preventorium," an institution designed to protect children from the ravages of the disease, emerged in this era of Progressive ideals in public health.

In this book, Cynthia A. Connolly provides a provocative analysis of public health and family welfare through the lens of the tuberculosis preventorium. This unique facility was intended to prevent TB in indigent children from families labeled irresponsible or at risk for developing the disease. Yet, it also held deeply rooted assumptions about class, race, and ethnicity. Connolly goes further to explain how the child-saving themes embedded in the preventorium movement continue to shape children's health care delivery and family policy in the United States.

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Science is Golden

A Problem-Solving Approach to Doing Science with Children

Ann Finkelstein

Michigan State University Press, 2002

The first book of its kind, Science is Golden discusses how to implement an inquiry-based, problem-solving approach to science education (grades K-5). Finkelstein shows parents and teachers how to help students investigate their own scientific questions. Rather than a set of guidelines for science fair projects, this book presents a method for helping students expand their creativity and develop logical thinking while learning science.
Starting with an introduction to the "brains-on method," Science is Golden explains brainstorming, experimental controls, collecting data, and how to streamline children's questions about science so that the questions define an experiment. Students will learn how to: ask good questions; clarify terminology; research, plan, and design experiments and controls; test assumptions; collect and analyze data; present results to others; and collaborate with adults.
Science is Golden is consistent with the National Science Education Standards proposed by the National Academy of Sciences, and the Michigan Essential Goals and Objectives for Science Education (K-12) from the Michigan State Board of Education.

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Secret Spaces of Childhood

Elizabeth Goodenough, Editor

University of Michigan Press, 2003

Whether it's real or imaginary, every child has a secret space, and this remarkable book explores them all. For some it's a treehouse or a hidden spot beneath a bush; for others it's a private psychic refuge--a favorite book, or a dollhouse that becomes a stage for a young imagination. As the more than four dozen pieces collected here reveal, such spaces play a key role in a child's development and retain a symbolic power that resonates throughout our adult lives. No reader will put this book down without experiencing a rush of familiar memories and new insights into that bygone world.

Poet Diane Ackerman evokes that "parallel universe behind the eyes / which no one shared, or dare discover"; Paul Brodeur recalls the "fort" where he and his brother defended Cape Cod against invaders in World War II; Nobelist Wole Soyinka offers a poignant verse portrait of Africa's lost children; and Paul West remembers youthful encounters with his eccentric neighbors Edith and Osbert Sitwell. Elsewhere, Robert Coles summons up memories of his first years as a doctor and a wise young patient who taught him a lesson he has never forgotten, and Mary Galbraith shows how childhood loss is transformed into art in Ludwig Bemelmans's classic Madeline. And these are just a few of the gems in a treasury that includes Anne Frank, the controversial photographs of Sally Mann and the crudely eloquent drawings of young South African refugees, clinical case studies and profoundly personal imagery.

A perceptive, thought-provoking work for general readers, Secret Spaces of Childhood opens a wonderful window on the world of the young.

Elizabeth Goodenough is Lecturer in Comparative Literature, the Residential College, University of Michigan.

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Securing the Future

Investing in Children From Birth to College

Sheldon Danziger

Russell Sage Foundation, 2000

More than ever, the economic health of a country depends upon the skills, knowledge, and capacities of its people. How does a person acquire these human assets and how can we promote their development? Securing the Future assembles an interdisciplinary team of scholars to investigate the full range of factors—pediatric, psychological, social, and economic—that bear on a child's development into a well-adjusted, economically productive member of society. A central purpose of the volume is to identify sound interventions that will boost human assets, particularly among the disadvantaged. The book provides a comprehensive evaluation of current initiatives and offers a wealth of new suggestions for effective public and private investments in child development. While children from affluent, highly educated families have good quality child care and an expensive education provided for them, children from poor families make do with informal child care and a public school system that does not always meet their needs. How might we best redress this growing imbalance? The contributors to this volume recommend policies that treat academic attainment together with psychological development and social adjustment. Mentoring programs, for example, promote better school performance by first fostering a young person's motivation to learn. Investments made early in life, such as preschool education, are shown to have the greatest impact on later learning for the least cost. In their focus upon children, however, the authors do not neglect the important links between generations. Poverty and inequality harm the development of parents and children alike. Interventions that empower parents to fight for better services and better schools are also of great benefit to their children. Securing the Future shows how investments in child development are both a means to an end and an end in themselves. They benefit the child directly and they also help that child contribute to the well-being of society. This book points us toward more effective strategies for promoting the economic success and the social cohesion of future generations. A Volume in the Ford Foundation Series on Asset Building

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Selling Science

Polio and the Promise of Gamma Globulin

Mawdsley, Stephen E

Rutgers University Press, 2016

Today, when many parents seem reluctant to have their children vaccinated, even with long proven medications, the Salk vaccine trial, which enrolled millions of healthy children to test an unproven medical intervention, seems nothing short of astonishing. In Selling Science, medical historian Stephen E. Mawdsley recounts the untold story of the first large clinical trial to control polio using healthy children—55,000 healthy children—revealing how this long-forgotten incident cleared the path for Salk’s later trial.

Mawdsley describes how, in the early 1950s, Dr. William Hammon and the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis launched a pioneering medical experiment on a previously untried scale. Conducted on over 55,000 healthy children in Texas, Utah, Iowa, and Nebraska, this landmark study assessed the safety and effectiveness of a blood component, gamma globulin, to prevent paralytic polio. The value of the proposed experiment was questioned by many prominent health professionals as it harbored potential health risks, but as Mawdsley points out, compromise and coercion moved it forward. And though the trial returned dubious results, it was presented to the public as a triumph and used to justify a federally sanctioned mass immunization study on thousands of families between 1953 and 1954. Indeed, the concept, conduct, and outcome of the GG study were sold to health professionals, medical researchers, and the public at each stage. At a time when most Americans trusted scientists, their mutual encounter under the auspices of conquering disease was shaped by politics, marketing, and at times, deception.

Drawing on oral history interviews, medical journals, newspapers, meeting minutes, and private institutional records, Selling Science sheds light on the ethics of scientific conduct, and on the power of marketing to shape public opinion about medical experimentation.

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Silent Violence

Global Health, Malaria, and Child Survival in Tanzania

Vinay R. Kamat

University of Arizona Press, 2013

Silent Violence engages the harsh reality of malaria and its effects on marginalized communities in Tanzania. Vinay R. Kamat presents an ethnographic analysis of the shifting global discourses and practices surrounding malaria control and their impact on the people of Tanzania, especially mothers of children sickened by malaria.

Malaria control, according to Kamat, has become increasingly medicalized, a trend that overemphasizes biomedical and pharmaceutical interventions while neglecting the social, political, and economic conditions he maintains are central to Africa’s malaria problem. Kamat offers recent findings on global health governance, neoliberal economic and health policies, and their impact on local communities.

Seeking to link wider social, economic, and political forces to local experiences of sickness and suffering, Kamat analyzes the lived experiences and practices of people most seriously affected by malaria—infants and children. The persistence of childhood malaria is a form of structural violence, he contends, and the resultant social suffering in poor communities is closely tied to social inequalities.

Silent Violence illustrates the evolving nature of local responses to the global discourse on malaria control. It advocates for the close study of disease treatment in poor communities as an integral component of global health funding. This ethnography combines a decade of fieldwork with critical review and a rare anthropological perspective on the limitations of the bureaucratic, technological, institutional, medical, and political practices that currently determine malaria interventions in Africa.

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Small

Life and Death on the Front Lines of Pediatric Surgery

Catherine Musemeche

Dartmouth College Press, 2014

As a pediatric surgeon, Catherine Musemeche operates on the smallest of human beings, manipulates organs the size of walnuts, and uses sutures as thin as hairs to resolve matters of life or death. Working in the small space of a premature infant’s chest or abdomen allows no margin for error. It is a world rife with emotion and risk. Small takes readers inside this rarefied world of pediatric medicine, where children and newborns undergo surgery to resolve congenital defects or correct the damages caused by accidents and disease. It is an incredibly high-stakes endeavor, nerve-wracking and fascinating. Small: Life and Death on the Front Lines of Pediatric Surgery is a gripping story about a still little-known frontier. In writing about patients and their families, Musemeche recounts the history of the developing field of pediatric surgery—so like adult medicine in many ways, but at the same time utterly different. This is a field guide to the state of the art and science of operating on the smallest human beings, the hurts and maladies that afflict them, and the changing nature of medicine in America today, told by an exceptionally gifted surgeon and writer.

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Sold Separately

Children and Parents in Consumer Culture

Seiter, Ellen

Rutgers University Press, 1995

"A radical approach to children's TV. . . . Seiter argues cogently that watching Saturday cartoons isn't a passive activity but a tool by which even the very young decode and learn about their culture, and develop creative imagination as well. Bolstered by social, political, developmental, and media research, Seiter ties middle-class aversion to children's TV and mass-market toys to an association with the 'uncontrollable consumerism'––and hence supposed moral failure––of working class members, women, and 'increasingly, children.' . . . Positive guidance for parents uncertain of the role of TV and TV toys in their children's lives."––Kirkus Reviews

"Sold Separately is about television and toys, and the various roles that they play in the lives of children and parents. In particular, Seiter examines toy advertising, both in print media and on television; TV commercials; toy-based video for girls, with an in-depth look at "My Little Pony"; action TV for boys, using "Slimer and the Real Ghostbusters" as her case study; and the stores where toys are sold, both Toys "R" Us and the more upscale shops . . . contains many provocative observations."––Women's Review of Books

"Ellen Seiter has a holiday message for yuppie parents who feel guilty shopping at Toys "R" Us. The mass-produced toys that dominate the chain's shelves need not be the enemy of every right-thinking parent. "Ghostbuster" figurines and "My Little Pony" can share the toy chest with those sensible wooden blocks."––Chronicle of Higher Education

"Emphasizing problems of socioeconomic class, gender, and race stereotyping, this study acknowledges the usual parental complaints about toys like Barbie and G.I. Joe, but insists that they do play an important role in children's culture, especially for working class families. A thought-provoking analysis."––Wilson Library Journal

"In this thought provoking study, Seiter reasonably urges parents and others to put aside their own tastes and to understand that children's consumer culture promotes solidarity and sociability among youngsters."––Publishers Weekly

"An important book for those desiring an overview of the toy industry's impact on consumer culture . . . [it] presents a fair and well-balanced view of the industry."––Kathleen M. Carson, associate editor, Playthings

"A refreshing, thoughtful, and insightful investigation of an enormously important subject––consumer culture for kids. . . . I can't recommend it highly enough."––Janice Radway, Duke University, author of Reading the Romance

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Sold Separately

Children and Parents in Consumer Culture

Seiter, Ellen

Rutgers University Press, 1993

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Something Musical Happened at the Library

Rob Reid

American Library Association, 2007

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Spirit Children

Illness, Poverty, and Infanticide in Northern Ghana

Aaron R. Denham

University of Wisconsin Press, 2019

In parts of West Africa, some babies and toddlers are considered spirit children—nonhumans sent from the forest to cause misfortune and destroy the family. These are usually deformed or ailing infants, the very young whose births coincide with tragic events, or children who display unusual abilities. In some of these cases, families seek a solution in infanticide. Many others do not.

Refusing to generalize or oversimplify, Aaron R. Denham offers an ethnographic study of the spirit child phenomenon in Northern Ghana that considers medical, economic, religious, and political realities. He examines both the motivations of the families and the structural factors that lead to infanticide, framing these within the context of global public health. At the same time, he turns the lens on Western societies and the misunderstandings that prevail in discourse about this controversial practice. Engaging the complexity of the context, local meanings, and moral worlds of those confronting a spirit child, Denham offers visceral accounts of families' life and death decisions.

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Stories of Raising Boys

Masculinity, Disability, Gender Expansiveness, and Anxiety

Julie-Ann Scott-Pollock

Temple University Press, 2026

In her poignant, affecting autoethnography, Stories of Raising Boys, Julie-Ann Scott-Pollock investigates the meaning of disability, gender, race, and privilege in contemporary culture. Scott-Pollock is a white mother living with a physical disability raising four boys—Theo, a three-year-old risktaker; Tony, ten, who lives with seizures; Vinny, eight, who is gender expansive; and five-year-old Nico, who is also gender expansive and experiences anxiety. They live on the southeastern U.S. coast with their father, Evan, and their baby sister, Rosalie.

Through narrative analysis, Scott-Pollock compares and contrasts her circumstances to the ways in which adult interviewees manage the same lived experiences as her sons. She also includes their opinions about masculinity and identity, as well as parenting boys. In doing so, Stories of Raising Boys deepens the cultural complexity of parent–child relationships and expands our collective understanding of how they form and emerge. In addition, Scott-Pollock uses a metaphor of swimming through the ocean near her family’s home to illustrate resisting marginalization while also promoting strong cultural identities, especially in turbulent waters.

Stories of Raising Boys offers an absorbing cultural reflection on the intersectionality of identity, power, and privilege.

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Strengthening Young Bodies, Building the Nation

A Social History of the Child Health and Welfare in Greece (1890–1940)

Vassiliki Theodorou

Central European University Press, 2019

Stimulated by the development of childhood studies and the social history of medicine, this book lays out the historical circumstances that led to the medicalization of childhood in Greece from the end of the nineteenth century until World War Two. For this span of fifty years, the authors explore how the national question was bound up with concerns raised about the health of children. They also investigate the various connotations of child health and maternity care in the context of liberal and authoritarian governments, as well as the wider social and cultural changes that took place in this period. Drawing on a wide array of primary and secondary sources, the authors look into the role of doctors, social thinkers and civil servants in the shaping of health policy; the impact of the medical paradigm from Western Europe; and the gradual professionalization of health care in Greece. Theodorou and Karakatsani describe an increasing intervention of the state in the medical supervision of childhood, the relationship between the philanthropic organizations and the state, as well as the impact of the national rivalries and wars on efforts to improve child health.

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Stuttering in Children and Adults

Thirty Years of Research at the University of Iowa

Wendell Johnson, Editor

University of Minnesota Press, 1955

Stuttering in Children and Adults was first published in 1955. 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.

One of the largest groups of handicapped people in the world today is made up of the estimated fifteen million persons who stutter. Their predicament has been one of man's most baffling problems ever since it was first recorded by the ancients, but not until the present century has the mystery of stuttering showed any signs of lifting.

The studies collected in this volume represent a substantial step toward the solving of the mystery. The University of Iowa, a pioneer in research on the causes and treatment of stuttering, has carried on its work for many years. This book presents all previously unpublished papers and dissertations (a total of forty-three) that have resulted from this research program.

Much of the work centers on the onset of stuttering in children and underlies the theory that stuttering begins with the hearer rather than the speaker. Interrelationships between personality and stuttering have been investigated, a search has been made for a possible physical basis for stuttering, conditions affecting severity of stuttering have been studied, and research on therapy has been attempted.

This is an important book for psychologists, educators, social workers, physicians, parents, and others concerned with speech disorders. For those who devote their full effort to the problems discussed—the specialists in speech pathology and therapy—the book is essential.

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