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The juvenile justice system navigates a high degree of variation in youthful offenders. While professionals with insights about reform and adolescent development consider the risks, the needs, and the patterns of delinquency of youth, too little attention is paid to the responses and practicalities of a system that is both complex and limited in its resources. 

In his essential book, Taking Juvenile Justice Seriously, Christopher Sullivan systematically analyzes key facets of justice-involved youth populations and parses cases to better understand core developmental influences that affect delinquency. He takes a comprehensive look at aspects of the life-course affected by juvenile justice as well as at the juvenile justice system’s operations and its multifaceted mission of delivering both treatment and sanctions to a varied population of youths.

Taking Juvenile Justice Seriously first provides an overview of the youth who encounter the system, then describes its present operations and obstacles, synthesizes relevant developmental insights, and reviews current practices. Drawing on research, theory, and evidence regarding innovative policies, Sullivan offers a series of well-grounded recommendations that suggest how to potentially—and realistically—implement a more effective juvenile justice system that would benefit all.

Grounded in direct, systematic observation by neutral observers, Talking with the Children of God is a unique study of the radical religious movement now known as The Family International. The book draws on extraordinarily candid interviews with the group's leaders and administrative staff. In revealing new information about the organization's history, beliefs, and use of prophecy, Gordon Shepherd and Gary Shepherd offer a highly detailed case study that is both an antidote to sensationalized coverage of the group and a means for understanding the transformational practices of new religious movements in general.

One of the most controversial groups emerging from the Jesus People movement of the 1960s, the Family originally was known as The Children of God. Under leader David Berg, members proclaimed an apocalyptic "Endtime," shunned secular occupations, lived communally, and adopted unusual sexual practices that led to abuse scandals in the 1970s and 1980s. Following Berg's death in 1994, the organization began to dramatically alter its evangelization efforts and decision-making processes.

Talking with the Children of God builds a picture of a complex organization with ten thousand core members worldwide, including details on the lives, careers, and responsibilities of the second generation and their efforts to defend their faith. The authors summarize the Family's history and beliefs as well as its controversial past. In particular, they analyze the organization's use of prophecy--or channeled revelations from Jesus and other spiritual beings--for making decisions and setting policy, revealing how this essentially democratic process works and how it shapes Family life and culture.

These remarkable insights are the result of sixteen years of surveys and field observations conducted in Family member homes in sixteen countries, plus four days of face-to-face interviews with Family leaders and organizational staff. The volume also includes condensed transcripts of the interviews with analysis by Shepherd and Shepherd.

From the time that the infant colonies broke away from the parent country to the present day, narratives of U.S. national identity are persistently configured in the language of childhood and family. In The American Child: A Cultural Studies Reader, contributors address matters of race, gender, and family to chart the ways that representations of the child typify historical periods and conflicting ideas. They build on the recent critical renaissance in childhood studies by bringing to their essays a wide range of critical practices and methodologies.

Although the volume is grounded heavily in the literary, it draws on other disciplines, revealing that representations of children and childhood are not isolated artifacts but cultural productions that in turn affect the social climates around them. Essayists look at games, pets, adolescent sexuality, death, family relations, and key texts such as The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and the movie Pocahontas; they reveal the ways in which the figure of the child operates as a rich vehicle for writers to consider evolving ideas of nation and the diverse role of citizens within it.

This collection reviews the best children's books that have appeared from 1973 to 1978. The reviews were written and selected by Zena Sutherland, the editor of the University of Chicago's Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books. Her 1973 edition of The Best in Children's Books, which covered books published from 1966 to 1972, was cited by the American School Board Journal as one of the outstanding books of the year in education.

Designed to aid adults—parents, teachers, librarians—in selecting from the best of recent children's literature, this guide provides 1,400 reviews of books published between 1979 and 1984.

This volume carries on the tradition established by Zena Sutherland's two earlier collections covering the periods from 1966 to 1972 and 1973 to 1978. Her 1973 edition of The Best in Children's Books was cited by the American School Board Journal as one of the outstanding books of the year in education.

One of John Green's "favorite books ever," a powerful, moving novel of family, parenthood, and loss

The most poignant of all Peter De Vries's novels, The Blood of the Lamb is also the most autobiographical. It follows the life of Don Wanderhop from his childhood in an immigrant Calvinist family living in Chicago in the 1950s through the loss of a brother, his faith, his wife, and finally his daughter-a tragedy drawn directly from De Vries's own life. Despite its foundation in misfortune, The Blood of the Lamb offers glimpses of the comic sensibility for which De Vries was famous. Engaging directly with the reader in a manner that buttresses the personal intimacy of the story, De Vries writes with a remarkableblend of grief, love, wit, and fury.

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. 

AIDS is now the leading cause of death in Africa, where twenty-eight million people are HIV-positive, and where some twelve million children have lost one or both parents to AIDS. In Zimbabwe, 45 percent of children under the age of five are HIV-positive, and the epidemic has shortened life expectancy by twenty-two years. A fifteen-year-old in Botswana or South Africa has a one-in-two chance of dying of AIDS. AIDS deaths are so widespread in sub-Saharan Africa that small children now play a new game called “Funerals.” The Children of Africa Confront AIDS depicts the reality of how African children deal with the AIDS epidemic, and how the discourse of their vulnerability affects acts of coping and courage. A project of the Institute for the African Child at Ohio University, The Children of Africa Confront AIDS cuts across disciplines and issues to focus on the world’s most marginalized population group, the children of Africa. Editors Arvind Singhal and Stephen Howard join conversations between humanitarian and political activists and academics, asking, “What shall we do?” Such discourse occurs in African contexts ranging from a social science classroom in Botswana to youth groups in Kenya and Ghana. The authors describe HIV/AIDS in its macro contexts of vulnerable children and the continent’s democratization movements and also in its national contexts of civil conflict, rural poverty, youth organizations, and agencies working on the ground. Singhal, Howard, and other contributors draw on compelling personal experience in descriptions of HIV/AIDS interventions for children in difficult circumstances and present thoughtful insights into data gathered from surveys and observations concerning this terrible epidemic.

Since the 1990s, a new cohort of Asian American writers has garnered critical and popular attention. Many of its members are the children of Asians who came to the United States after the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 lifted long-standing restrictions on immigration. This new generation encompasses writers as diverse as the graphic novelists Adrian Tomine and Gene Luen Yang, the short story writer Nam Le, and the poet Cathy Park Hong. Having scrutinized more than one hundred works by emerging Asian American authors and having interviewed several of these writers, Min Hyoung Song argues that collectively, these works push against existing ways of thinking about race, even as they demonstrate how race can facilitate creativity. Some of the writers eschew their identification as ethnic writers, while others embrace it as a means of tackling the uncertainty that many people feel about the near future. In the literature that they create, a number of the writers that Song discusses take on pressing contemporary matters such as demographic change, environmental catastrophe, and the widespread sense that the United States is in national decline.

The Children of God emerged out of the hippie movement of the 1960s, and through the 1980s they came to blend Christianity with sexual freedom, communal living, and a rejection of materialism and “the system.” The Children, or “the Family” as they are now called, modified their behavior in the 1990s in the wake of several child sexual abuse charges (all dismissed) and the need for direction among the rising generation of Family members. They continue to live communally, proselytize full-time (none hold traditional jobs) and engage in sexual “sharing.” As a byproduct of their evangelism, they have produced a number of accomplished musicians. They receive guidance for their daily lives through periodic revelations passed to them by the Family’s current leader, Maria (the founder’s widow), and her associates. Despite their variance from traditional Christian beliefs and practices, their recent attempts to conform to some degree with cultural norms in whatever country they work has tempered criticism, and they continue as the most successful communal movement of an almost forgotten hippie world.

This edition includes a new introduction by the theologian and Niebuhr scholar Gary Dorrien in which he elucidates the work’s significance and places it firmly into the arc of Niebuhr’s career.

    "A work of scientific substance and critical wisdom, developed in
        the urbane idiom of a French scholar." -- J. T. Fraser, founder,
        International Society for the Study of Time
      "This is the book for those of us who couldn't wade completely through
        Hawking's A Brief History of Time and now have it collecting dust
        on our bookshelves. Well written, thought-provoking, and, most important,
        understandable." -- Michael Epstein, analytical spectroscopist/chemist,
        National Institute of Standards and Technology
      What is time? Does it really pass? These and other fascinating questions
        about the nature of time animate a continuing philosophical and scientific
        debate. In this popular French book, now available for the first time
        in English; my Lestienne moves to make the bewildering concepts
        of time accessible--and interesting. He uses Galileo, Newton, Einstein,
        and others to demonstrate how the concepts of causality and entropy became
        so pervasive that they eventually were substituted for time itself. He
        also shows how recent advances in astronomy, particle physics, developmental
        life sciences, and the neurosciences are helping to shape a new philosophical
        vision of time.
 

How do children imagine God? Surprisingly, few researchers have asked this question. In crayon drawings, doll-play, letters, and carefully designed interviews, the forty children in David Heller's study reveal a rich array of spiritual imagery. Though Heller does find some differing views attributable to age, gender, and religious background (the children were Jewish, Catholic, Protestant, and Hindu), he discovers to a surprising degree a common vision of God that cuts across ethnic and religious differences. He also considers related issues of school prayer and the psychology of religion.

In this vivid ethnography, Jessaca B. Leinaweaver explores “child circulation,” informal arrangements in which indigenous Andean children are sent by their parents to live in other households. At first glance, child circulation appears tantamount to child abandonment. When seen in that light, the practice is a violation of international norms regarding children’s rights, guidelines that the Peruvian state relies on in regulating legal adoptions. Leinaweaver demonstrates that such an understanding of the practice is simplistic and misleading. Her in-depth ethnographic analysis reveals child circulation to be a meaningful, pragmatic social practice for poor and indigenous Peruvians, a flexible system of kinship that has likely been part of Andean lives for centuries. Child circulation may be initiated because parents cannot care for their children, because a childless elder wants company, or because it gives a young person the opportunity to gain needed skills.

Leinaweaver provides insight into the emotional and material factors that bring together and separate indigenous Andean families in the highland city of Ayacucho. She describes how child circulation is intimately linked to survival in the city, which has had to withstand colonialism, economic isolation, and the devastating civil war unleashed by the Shining Path. Leinaweaver examines the practice from the perspective of parents who send their children to live in other households, the adults who receive them, and the children themselves. She relates child circulation to international laws and norms regarding children’s rights, adoptions, and orphans, and to Peru’s history of racial conflict and violence. Given that history, Leinaweaver maintains that it is not surprising that child circulation, a practice associated with Peru’s impoverished indigenous community, is alternately ignored, tolerated, or condemned by the state.

In this revealing social history, Daniel Thomas Cook explores the roots of children’s consumer culture—and the commodification of childhood itself—by looking at the rise, growth, and segmentation of the children’s clothing industry. Cook describes how in the early twentieth century merchants, manufacturers, and advertisers of children’s clothing began to aim commercial messages at the child rather than the mother. Cook situates this fundamental shift in perspective within the broader transformation of the child into a legitimate, individualized, self-contained consumer.

The Commodification of Childhood begins with the publication of the children’s wear industry’s first trade journal, The Infants’ Department, in 1917 and extends into the early 1960s, by which time the changes Cook chronicles were largely complete. Analyzing trade journals and other documentary sources, Cook shows how the industry created a market by developing and promulgating new understandings of the “nature,” needs, and motivations of the child consumer. He discusses various ways that discursive constructions of the consuming child were made material: in the creation of separate children’s clothing departments, in their segmentation and layout by age and gender gradations (such as infant, toddler, boys, girls, tweens, and teens), in merchants’ treatment of children as individuals on the retail floor, and in displays designed to appeal directly to children. Ultimately, The Commodification of Childhood provides a compelling argument that any consideration of “the child” must necessarily take into account how childhood came to be understood through, and structured by, a market idiom.

How can child care be structured to protect both the interests of children and the rights of women? Must children suffer the "loss" of their childhood through institutional care? Polakow uses her observations of pre-school centers—including profit-run, federally funded, community, and Montessori institutions—to open the "windows of daycare."

Ranch families in the twenty-first century face many challenges, from competition with government-subsidized agribusiness corporations to tax laws that encourage development over agriculture and prevent the smooth transfer of land from one generation to the next. As a stabilizing force in the American West, ranch families play a critical role in our country, perhaps more so today than ever before, yet their stories have rarely been told. They contribute to our nation with the food they raise, the environments they protect, and the resources they manage, and they preserve our western heritage while holding the West open for the rest of us. In The Family Ranch, award-winning author Linda Hussa offers readers a personal, inside view into the lives of six diverse ranching families and the land that shapes their days and nights. Photographer Madeleine Graham Blake provides engaging and often moving images that portray each family at work and at play. With chapters on the critical issues that face each of them—from grazing rights and water use, to children's education and the emerging rural marketplace—these family profiles are set in a larger context. This is family ranching as it is now, a tracing of how it always was, but made far more complex in modern times. By combining their traditions with the tools of modern technology, these people strengthen the ideal of family and give the business of ranching a vibrant and viable future.The Family Ranch is rich in remarkable stories of what happens when parents, children, work, and nature come together for a lifetime of commitment. It speaks to urban and rural people in important ways, illuminating the realities of the western ranch and the people who make their living, and their lives, on it. Essential reading for people who love the West and care about its future. The Family Ranch inspires thoughts about tradition, values, and responsibility that are applicable to all communities.

The memoirs of Jews who were children during the Nazi occupation of Poland

This book serves as a memorial to loved ones who do not even have a grave, as well as a tribute to those who risked their lives and families to save a Jewish child. A wide variety of experiences during the Nazi occupation of Poland are related with wrenching simplicity and candor, experiences that illustrate horrors and deprivation, but also present examples of courage and compassion.

These recollections-whether of hiding in forests or camouflaged bunkers, fighting with groups of partisans, enduring the horrors of concentration camps, or living in fear under disguised identities-serve as eloquent testimony to the depth, diversity, and richness of humanity under siege and offer a powerful lesson for future generations. Written by people who remained in Poland after the war, these accounts convey a great immediacy; the authors are not removed from the environment in which these experiences took place. The psychological impact on these child survivors and the difficulties they encountered even after the war are very poignant. The passing years have brought urgency to the publication of these stories, as those who wrote them are the last surviving eyewitnesses of these tumultuous events.
 

These testimonies, submitted by individual authors and not originally intended for publication, were assembled as a historical record by the Association of the Children of the Holocaust in Poland. While evil and brutal anti-Semitism are described, the accounts also reveal the great risks taken by courageous individuals in order to save Jewish children.

The adventures of Mole, Ratty, Mr. Toad, and Mr. Badger—and their tangles with the Weasels—have been adored by children for more than a century. Yet, with its oddly bureaucratic town dramas and the esoteric hobbies of its protagonists, The Wind in the Willows was originally intended almost entirely for adults. Though first inspired by bedtime stories Kenneth Grahame told to his son Alastair, as he wrote them down, the tales of these woodland creatures developed into something much more sophisticated.
            Peter Hunt explores the unusual trajectory of The Wind in the Willows through previously unpublished archival materials, original drawings, and fan letters (including one from Theodore Roosevelt). He identifies the colleagues and friends on whom Grahame is thought to have based the characters of Mole, Rat, Badger, and Toad, and explores the literary genres of boating, caravanning, and motoring on which the author drew. He also recounts the extraordinary correspondence surrounding the book’s first publication and the influence of two determined women—publisher’s agent Constance Smedley and the author’s wife, Elspeth Grahame—who helped turn the book into the classic for children we know and love today. Generously illustrated throughout, this book celebrates one of the most beloved works of children’s literature ever published.

In this devastatingly funny classic, Frederick Crews skewers the ego-inflated pretensions of the schools and practitioners of literary criticism popular in the 1960s, including Freudians, Aristotelians, and New Critics. Modeled on the "casebooks" often used in freshman English classes at the time, The Pooh Perplex contains twelve essays written in different critical voices, complete with ridiculous footnotes, tongue-in-cheek "questions and study projects," and hilarious biographical notes on the contributors. This edition contains a new preface by the author that compares literary theory then and now and identifies some of the real-life critics who were spoofed in certain chapters.

Children are thoroughly, shockingly queer, as Kathryn Bond Stockton explains in The Queer Child, where she examines children’s strangeness, even some children’s subliminal “gayness,” in the twentieth century. Estranging, broadening, darkening forms of children emerge as this book illuminates the child queered by innocence, the child queered by color, the child queered by Freud, the child queered by money, and the grown homosexual metaphorically seen as a child (or as an animal), alongside the gay child. What might the notion of a “gay” child do to conceptions of the child? How might it outline the pain, closets, emotional labors, sexual motives, and sideways movements that attend all children, however we deny it?

Engaging and challenging the work of sociologists, legal theorists, and historians, Stockton coins the term “growing sideways” to describe ways of growing that defy the usual sense of growing “up” in a linear trajectory toward full stature, marriage, reproduction, and the relinquishing of childish ways. Growing sideways is a mode of irregular growth involving odd lingerings, wayward paths, and fertile delays. Contending that children’s queerness is rendered and explored best in fictional forms, including literature, film, and television, Stockton offers dazzling readings of works ranging from novels by Henry James, Radclyffe Hall, Virginia Woolf, Djuna Barnes, and Vladimir Nabokov to the movies Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, The Hanging Garden, Heavenly Creatures, Hoop Dreams, and the 2005 remake of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. The result is a fascinating look at children’s masochism, their interactions with pedophiles and animals, their unfathomable, hazy motives (leading them at times into sex, seduction, delinquency, and murder), their interracial appetites, and their love of consumption and destruction through the alluring economy of candy.

In 1939, on the eve of Hitler's invasion of Poland, seven-year-old Edith Milton (then Edith Cohn) and her sister Ruth left Germany by way of the Kindertransport, the program which gave some 10,000 Jewish children refuge in England. The two were given shelter by a jovial, upper-class British foster family with whom they lived for the next seven years. Edith chronicles these transformative experiences of exile and good fortune in The Tiger in the Attic, a touching memoir of growing up as an outsider in a strange land.

In this illuminating chronicle, Edith describes how she struggled to fit in and to conquer self-doubts about her German identity. Her realistic portrayal of the seemingly mundane yet historically momentous details of daily life during World War II slowly reveals istelf as a hopeful story about the kindness and generosity of strangers. She paints an account rich with colorful characters and intense relationships, uncanny close calls and unnerving bouts of luck that led to survival. Edith's journey between cultures continues with her final passage to America—yet another chapter in her life that required adjustment to a new world—allowing her, as she narrates it here, to visit her past as an exile all over again.

The Tiger in the Attic is a literary gem from a skilled fiction writer, the story of a thoughtful and observant child growing up against the backdrop of the most dangerous and decisive moment in modern European history. Offering a unique perspective on Holocaust studies, this book is both an exceptional and universal story of a young German-Jewish girl caught between worlds.

Poems written by children are not typically part of the literary canon. Because of cultural biases that frame young people as intellectually and artistically immature, these works are often excluded or dismissed as juvenilia. Rachel Conrad contends that youth-composed poems should be read as literary works in their own right—works that are deserving of greater respect in literary culture.

Time for Childhoods presents a selection of striking twentieth-and twenty-first-century American poetry written by young people, and highlights how young poets imagined and shaped time for their own poetic purposes. Through close engagement with archival materials, as well as select interviews and correspondence with adult mentors, Conrad discerns how young writers figured social realities and political and racial injustices, and discusses what important advocates such as Gwendolyn Brooks and June Jordan can teach us about supporting the agency of young poets. This essential study demonstrates that young poets have much to contribute to ongoing conversations about time and power.

The belief that with hard work and determination, all children have the opportunity to succeed in life is a cherished part of the American Dream. Yet, increased inequality in America has made that dream more difficult for many to obtain. In Too Many Children Left Behind, an international team of social scientists assesses how social mobility varies in the United States compared with Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom. Bruce Bradbury, Miles Corak, Jane Waldfogel, and Elizabeth Washbrook show that the academic achievement gap between disadvantaged American children and their more advantaged peers is far greater than in other wealthy countries, with serious consequences for their future life outcomes. With education the key to expanding opportunities for those born into low socioeconomic status families, Too Many Children Left Behind helps us better understand educational disparities and how to reduce them.

Analyzing data on 8,000 school children in the United States, the authors demonstrate that disadvantages that begin early in life have long lasting effects on academic performance. The social inequalities that children experience before they start school contribute to a large gap in test scores between low- and high-SES students later in life. Many children from low-SES backgrounds lack critical resources, including books, high-quality child care, and other goods and services that foster the stimulating environment necessary for cognitive development. The authors find that not only is a child’s academic success deeply tied to his or her family background, but that this class-based achievement gap does not narrow as the child proceeds through school.

The authors compare test score gaps from the United States with those from three other countries and find smaller achievement gaps and greater social mobility in all three, particularly in Canada. The wider availability of public resources for disadvantaged children in those countries facilitates the early child development that is fundamental for academic success. All three countries provide stronger social services than the United States, including universal health insurance, universal preschool, paid parental leave, and other supports. The authors conclude that the United States could narrow its achievement gap by adopting public policies that expand support for children in the form of tax credits, parenting programs, and pre-K.

With economic inequalities limiting the futures of millions of children, Too Many Children Left Behind is a timely study that uses global evidence to show how the United States can do more to level the playing field.

Within corporate media industries, adults produce children’s entertainment. Yet children, presumed to exist outside the professional adult world, make their own contributions to it—creating and posting unboxing videos, for example, that provide content for toy marketers. Many adults, meanwhile, avidly consume entertainment products nominally meant for children. Media industries reincorporate this market-disrupting participation into their strategies, even turning to adult consumers to pass fandom to the next generation.

Derek Johnson presents an innovative perspective that looks beyond the simple category of “kids’ media” to consider how entertainment industry strategies invite producers and consumers alike to cross boundaries between adulthood and childhood, professional and amateur, new media and old. Revealing the social norms, reproductive ideals, and labor hierarchies on which such transformations depend, he identifies the lines of authority and power around which legacy media institutions like television, comics, and toys imagine their futures in a digital age. Johnson proposes that it is not strategies of media production, but of media reproduction, that are most essential in this context. To understand these critical intersections, he investigates transgenerational industry practice in television co-viewing, recruitment of adult comic readers as youth outreach ambassadors, media professionals’ identification with childhood, the branded management of adult fans of LEGO, and the labor of child YouTube video creators. These dynamic relationships may appear to disrupt generational and industry boundaries alike. However, by considering who media industries empower when generating the future in these reproductive terms and who they leave out, Johnson ultimately demonstrates how their strategies reinforce existing power structures.

This book makes vital contributions to media studies in its fresh approach to the intersections of adulthood and childhood, its attention to the relationship between legacy and digital media industries, and its advancement of dialogue between media production and consumption researchers. It will interest scholars in media industry studies and across media studies more broadly, with particular appeal to those concerned about the current and future reach of media industries into our lives.