Today's children spend more time than ever before watching television, playing computer games and reading comic and pulp fiction. Many of these are directly designed by the toy and media industry. Are children therefore simply being manipulated?
There is widespread concern that because of these kinds of popular fiction, children do not read quality' literature, resulting in lower standards of literacy. There is also the further fear that because many of these popular media portray highly stereotyped, gendered images, this too will have a damaging effect on children.
Mary Hilton's fascinating book proves that there is another side to the argument. We do not have to view popular culture as a threat to our children or their education. The writers of this collection show how, used carefully alongside other types of literature, popular culture can actually help teachers to develop literacy in a broad and positive sense.

Examines how youth is being increasingly subjected to racial stereotyping and violence in various realms of popular culture, especially childrens' culture.

Focusing on change and reform in secondary and elementary schools, this book explores the possibilities for better schooling for early adolescents.

Focusing on change and reform in secondary and elementary schools, this book explores the possibilities for better schooling for early adolescents.

A little explored area of childhood is that of the troubles and difficulties children experience simply by being children. Using adults' stories about being a child, such as not being believed, being left unprotected against monsters, and discovering that Santa Claus is not real, this book presents children as they live in the social worlds of adults and in social worlds of their own making. The book brings to life the "little trials of childhood" - anxieties and problems facing children which seem to escape the attention of adults.

A little explored area of childhood is that of the troubles and difficulties children experience simply by being children. Using adults' stories about being a child, such as not being believed, being left unprotected against monsters, and discovering that Santa Claus is not real, this book presents children as they live in the social worlds of adults and in social worlds of their own making. The book brings to life the "little trials of childhood" - anxieties and problems facing children which seem to escape the attention of adults.

This book explores the vigorous film cultures of mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong from the perspective of youth culture. The book relates this important topic to the wider social, cultural, and institutional context, and discusses the relationship between the films and the changes that today are transforming each society. Among the areas explored are the differences between the three film industries, their creation of new types of screen hero and heroine, and their conflicts with traditional Chinese attitudes such as respect for age. The many films discussed provide fresh perspectives on the ways in which young people are coping with gender, sexuality, class, coming of age, the pressures of education, and major social shifts such as rural to urban migration. They show young adults in each society striving to construct new value systems for a complex, rapidly changing environment.

First Published in 1996. This book presents the importance of listening to pupils in classrooms and schools with attention given to historical background and the voice of the child with special educational needs. The title covers pastoral care and personal development as well as assessing how children with emotional and behavioural difficulties view professionals. Aimed at teachers, scholars and parents, the book sets the scene for the voice of a child and provides insight into how practices can further develop.

The articles in this volume shed light on some of the major tensions in the field of children's rights (such as the ways in which children's best interests and respect for their autonomy can be reconciled), challenges (such as how the CRC can be made a reality in the lives of children in the face of ignorance, apathy or outright opposition) and critiques (whether children's rights are a Western imposition or a successful global consensus). Along the way, the writing covers a myriad of issues, encompassing the opposition to the CRC in the US; gay parenting: Dr Seuss's take on children's autonomy; the voice of neonates on their health care; the role of NGO in supporting child labourers in India, and young people in detention and more.

A presentation of current work that systematically explores and articulates the nature, origin and development of reasoning, this volume's primary aim is to describe and examine contemporary theory and research findings on the topic of deductive reasoning. Many contributors believe concepts such as "structure," "competence," and "mental logic" are necessary features for a complete understanding of reasoning. As the book emanates from a Jean Piaget Symposium, his theory of intellectual development as the standard contemporary treatment of deductive reasoning is used as the context in which the contributors elaborate on their own perceptions.

This collection provides a guide to the legal requirements surrounding children's rights. The book discusses the practicalities and problems of listening to the child in educational, social and health settings.

Adolescent researchers are increasingly aware that they must examine development both across time and across context. To do so, however, requires new conceptualizations and methodological approaches to the study of development, including attention to the pathways young people choose in adolescence and follow into adulthood. This volume assembles work by key researchers in the field who are struggling to understand how developmental trajectories are constructed and maintained throughout the adolescent period.
A complete understanding of developmental pathways requires the recognition that adolescents' social contexts--family, school, neighborhood, and/or peer group--are important influences on the choices they make at this developmental period. Researchers have traditionally studied contexts in isolation rather than examining the interrelationships among contexts and their implications for adolescent development. The present volume seeks to address this gap in the literature, with attention given notonly to the interrelationships among contexts for white, middle-class youth, but also to these issues for minority adolescents in neighborhoods that vary in terms of access to resources. It concludes with an examination of researcher-community collaboration as a strategy to move communities toward a greater awareness of adolescent development and the problems facing youth in their community, and as a means to promote potential avenues for policy change and intervention.

Arising from the Cohens' work on the epidemiology of childhood psychopathology, this book explores the two aspects of motivational structure--ideas and values--that underlie the development of maladaptive functioning and symptoms. The first aspect is a measure of what children admire in their peers; this measure is seen as an operationalization of personal ideals. The second is a measure of life goals, seen as a representation of the contemporary structure of long-term personal values.
Despite the considerable amount of attention given in the popular press and among social critics and politicians, values have been relatively neglected as a topic of empirical research in this country. To fill the void, this work uses data from a large cohort of young people who have been studied longitudinally since early childhood to elucidate three aspects of life goals and values:
* What are the demographic, family, peer, school, and intrapersonal influences that shape values and life goals of adolescents?
* How do they change over the course of adolescence?
* What impact do these values have on the lives of adolescents and young adults?
Decisions about what we find most admirable and which of the many apparently good things in life we will take on as our top priorities are consequential both for the contemporary and for the future emotional and behavioral well-being of the individual. Thus, this book explores systematically the environmental origins of ideals and values, using deprivation and attainment hypotheses to examine a variety of influences on the development of differences in values. This book also examines the relationship between the measures of children's values and psychopathology, examining both the "Axis 1" diagnosis, including disruptive behavior disorders, depression, and anxiety, and the "Axis 2" personality disorders.
Providing an extensive study of the life values of adolescents and the state of their mental health, this monograph will be of interest to developmental psychologists specializing in adolescence, child clinical psychologists, and psychiatrists.

A groundbreaking collection of essays on a hitherto underexplored subject that challenges the existing stereotypical views of the trivial and innocent nature of children's culture, this work reveals for the first time the artistic and complex interactions among children. Based on research of scholars from such diverse fields as American studies, anthropology, education, folklore, psychology, and sociology, this volume represents a radical new attempt to redefine and reinterpret the expressive behaviors of children. The book is divided into four major sections: history, methodology, genres, and setting, with a concluding chapter on theory. Each section is introduced by an overview by Brian Sutton-Smith. The accompanying bibliography lists historical references through the present, representing works by scholars for over 100 years.

Youth Work Process and Practice provides an overview of the central concerns in youth work today, exploring what youth work actually consists in and developing an authentic theoretical framework for practice. This accessible textbook places the role of the curriculum and idea of practice as a process at the centre of youth work. Exploring important aspects of practice - such as empowerment, participation and choice, group work, experiential learning and the importance of relationship building - Jon Ord explains how the idea of curriculum can be used to communicate, legitimate and develop youth worth practice, as well as help to articulate its value and importance. The book includes a detailed and up-to-date analysis of the policy climate, looks at the implications of its focus on measurability and outcomes and discusses the impact of devolution in the UK on youth work practice. It contrasts dominant contemporary perspectives of youth and youth culture and argues that, rather than competing, 'informal' and 'social' education are twin aspects of an educational practice which must emphasises both individual development and wider social change. Youth Work Process and Practice is an essential read for all students of youth and community work and will also be an important reference for practising youth workers.

This book, based on extensive original research, examines the nature of Catholicism in the contemporary Philippines. It shows how Catholicism is apparently flourishing, with good attendance at Sunday Masses, impressive religious processions and flourishing charismatic groups, and with interventions by the Catholic hierarchy in national and local politics. However, focusing in particular on the beliefs and practices of young people, the book shows that young people are often adopting a different, more individualised approach to Catholicism, which is frequently out of step with the official position. It considers the features of this: a more personal and experiential relationship with God; a new approach to morality, in which right living is seen as more important than right believing; and a critical view of what is seen as the Catholic hierarchy's misguidedness. The book argues that this reinterpreting of religion by young people has the potential to alter fundamentally the nature of Catholicism in the Philippines, but that, nevertheless, young people's new approach involves a solid, enduring commitment and a strong view of their own Catholic, religious identity.

A symposium titled, "Touch in Infancy" was held to celebrate the opening of the first Touch Research Institute in the world. Although touch is the largest sense organ in the body, it is the one that had been the most neglected and the only one to just recently have a research institute. Designed to conduct basic research on touch and on the skin, the institute will work with wellness programs such as massage therapy and other kinds of touch therapies to facilitate better health and to treat various diseases. The institute's opening symposium featured presentations from several of the world's leading experts in infant development. Published in this volume, their work addresses the relevance of touch to the neonate's well-being.

Child surveillance is a subject of increasing scientific, social and political debate in many countries of the world. In the UK, protocols for effective action are based on a government report, 'Health for all children'. The research which gave rise to these protocols has been developed further in the Netherlands and, drawing on the experience of other health care systems, has produced conclusions which challenge some widely-accepted assumptions about appropriate procedures. This book reviews the international research and recommendations of the Dutch working party. It presents an authoritative and practical survey of the contents and frequency of child health surveillance programmes, procedures for quality control and improvement, possibilities for parental involvement, and the levels of expertise necessary to run programmes effectively. It offers a clear vision of a more sophisticated approach to child health care and is therefore an important reference for community paediatricians and others involved in the development of primary care.

SEE SHORT BLURB FOR ALTERNATE COPY... A complex, intriguing, and important verbal entity, the proverb has been the subject of a vast number of opinions, studies, and analyses. To accommodate the assorted possible audiences, this volume outlines seven views of the proverb -- personal, formal, religious, literary, practical, cultural, and cognitive. Because the author's goal is to provide a scientific understanding of proverb comprehension and production, he draws largely on scholarship stemming from the formal, cultural, and cognitive views. The only book about proverbs that is written from the standpoint of cognitive science, cognitive psychology, and experimentalism, this text provides a larger, more interdisciplinary perspective on the proverb. It also gives a theoretically more integrated approach to proverb cognition. The conceptual base theory of proverb comprehension is extended via the "cognitive ideals hypothesis" so that the theory now addresses issues regarding the creation, production, and pragmatics of proverbs. This hypothesis also has strong implications for a taxonomy of proverbs, proverb comprehension, universal vs. culture-specific aspects of proverbs, and some structural aspects of proverbs. In general, the book extends the challenge of proverb cognition by using much of what cognitive science has to offer. In so doing, the proverb is compared to other forms of figurative language, which is then discussed within the larger rubric of intelligence and the inclination for using indirect modes of communication. Child developmental and brain substrates are also discussed.

USE THIS FIRST PARAGRAPH ONLY FOR GENERAL CATALOGS... This book addresses the subject of children and television -- how they view it, what they think of specific programs, and how these likes and dislikes affect learning of the content presented. Broad in coverage, it looks at evaluation, comprehension, and impact in the drama, information and entertainment domains. In all cases, demographic and background experiences and knowledge are assessed for their contribution to learning, attitude/opinion change, and stability as a function of exposure to particular program content. Empirical investigations of police dramas, science programs, and quiz shows are conducted utilizing experimental methods and involving approximately 1,000 children in a series of studies.
Related to existing research literature, this work confirms the view of the child/adolescent as an active viewer who is critical, constructive, and capable of learning from the television medium -- even when the program is clearly broadcast as entertainment rather than as education or information. This volume is unique in that it addresses questions of the relation between children and diverse television content in terms of its impact on social and informational schemas.

The Social Organization of Juvenile Justice recasts familiar sociological problems of research within a dramatically new and different theoretical and methodological perspective. In seeing law enforcement officers, no less than those accuse of criminal behavior, as locked into the "creation of history," or more precisely, a series of retrospective and prospective interpretations of events both within and disengaged from, the social contexts relevant to what purportedly took place, Aaron Cicourel redefined the fault lines of contemporary criminology.

The work makes imaginative use of a wide variety of new techniques of analysis from ethnomethodology to community studies--while at no point ignoring basic hard statistical data--in this study of juvenile justice in two California cities. Cicourel states the purpose of his book with clarity: "The decision-making activities that produce the social problem called delinquency (and the socially organized procedures that provide for judicial outcomes) are important because they highlight fundamental processes of how social order is possible."

This work challenges the conventional view that assumes delinquents are natural social types distributed in some ordered fashion, and produced by a set of abstract internal or external pressures from the social structure. Cicourel views the everyday organizational workings of the police, probation departments, courts, and schools, demonstrating how these agencies contribute to various kinds of transformations of the original events that led to law enforcement contact.

This contextual creation of facts in turn leads to improvised, ad hoc interpretations of character structure, family life, and future prospects. In this way, the agencies may generate delinquency by their routine encounters with the young. His new introduction discusses with great detail the methodology behind his research and responses to earlier critiques of his work.

Blending academic theory with policy guidelines and practical suggestions, this book provides a review of current approaches to assessment and Intervention For Children With Emotional And Behavioural Difficulties. It incorporates a discussion of government guidelines on policy and provision with schools and LEAs and reviews a range of successful innovations in intervention. Specific areas are covered, including Exclusion, Integration And Emotional Abuse.; Five Recurring Themes permeate the whole book, these being: the effects of government legislation on all aspects of EBD assessment and provision; the recognition that children with EBD come from economically and socially disadvantaged families and the implication that this has for assessment and provision; the problems of agreeing on an acceptable definition of EBD; the fact that children labelled as EBD do not have an equal opportunity to assessment and provision; and the belief that schools can make a substantial contribution to the prevention of EBD.

In recent years the growing incidence of the use and misuse of alcohol by children and adolescents has been causing increasing concern within society. This work is one of the few studies to examine the orientations towards alcohol of young children. Through a series of ingenious game-like activities, Fossey provides valuable insight into ways in which children learn about drinking. Some of the results are surprising and others are deeply disturbing, but they all emphasize the fact that most young people in drinking cultures begin to form their impressions about alcohol at a very tender age. This study suggests that there is a need for development of innovative and user-friendly alcohol education materials for use in primary as well as in secondary schools and colleges. "Growing up with Alcohol" should be useful reading for a range of people, including social science students, parents, teachers, researchers and practitioners in alcohol and health education.

Written by a multi-disciplinary group of leading practitioners, Sexual Offending Against Children provides an account of the practice, policy and management issues involved in the assessment and treatment of adult and adolescent sexual offenders against children. Written for practitioners from all disciplines concerned with this area of work, it is underpinned by a strong theoretical base, giving a practical and detailed description of the management of sexual offenders, as well as the potential impact on service providers.

First published in 2001. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.