This book examines the key aging processes in seven countries (United States, United Kingdom, Sweden, Japan, China, Nepal, and South Africa) and the main policies that have been, and are being, developed to deal with this rapid change in the demographic profile. It addresses the problems that are identified as well as the positive aspects of aging within each of these contrasting societies. Thus it makes a significant contribution to the major debates about growing old across the globe.

This edited collection captures the intersection between migration, mobility and childhood studies. Contributors explore under-researched child and youth short-term and micro movements within major migration fluxes that occur in response to migration and global change.

This insightful, research-driven book offers practical advice to older adults seeking new intimate relationships, lasting friendships, and better relationships with family members and children. Written to appeal to men as well as women, Mature Friendships, Love, and Romance: A Practical Guide to Intimacy for Older Adults is a serious book about love, romance, intimacy, and sexuality, as well as friendship and family. It is about what happens when older adults lack close relationships and about practical ways to address that isolation and loneliness. Through personal stories and vignettes, readers will see how notions of friendship, intimacy, and love change as we age, what mature love is, and what factors can make it challenging. Among the topics discussed are late-life divorces and breakups of long-term relationships; finding new and intimate friendships; resolving problems with adult children that can emerge when you enter a new, loving relationship; and choosing activities to increase your pool of potential friends and mates. Internet dating is addressed, as are the general thoughts and actions of happy people who agree life can start at 60. Presents powerful personal stories about mature love and intimacy Includes case studies of mature adults experiencing love and intimacy problems, offering explanations of the problems and effective and realistic solutions Discusses current research on love and intimacy problems of older adults

This in-depth description of life in a nursing/care home for 70 residents and 40 staff highlights the daily care of frail or ill residents between 80 and 100 years of age, including people suffering with dementia. How residents interact with care assistants is emphasised, as are the different behaviours of men and women observed during a year of daily conversations between the author, patients and staff, who share their stories of the pressures of the work. Living Before Dying shows a world where, in extreme old age, people have to learn how to cope with living communally.

This book brings together the newest and the most innovative scholarship on Nigerian children-one of the least researched groups in African colonial history. It engages the changing conceptions of childhood, relating it to the broader themes about modernity, power, agency, and social transformation under imperial rule.

In this new, revised edition of his landmark book, Montagu compels us to reevaluate the way we think about growth and development, in all its phases, throughout life. Humans are designed to grow and develop their childlike qualities, and not to become the ossified adults prescribed by society. Montagu demonstrates how our culture, schools, and families are in conspiracy against such childlike traits as the need to love, to learn, to wonder, to know, to explore, to think, to experiment, to be imaginative, creative and curious, to sing, dance, or play. He also reveals the many links between physical and mental aging and tells how to prevent psychosclerosis, the hardening of the mind, so that we can die young--as late as possible. The best statement ever written on the most important, neglected theme of human life and evolution. "Stephen Jay Gould, Harvard University"

In this new, revised edition of his landmark book, Montagu compels us to reevaluate the way we think about growth and development, in all its phases, throughout life. Humans are designed to grow and develop their childlike qualities, and not to become the ossified adults prescribed by society. Montagu demonstrates how our culture, schools, and families are in conspiracy against such childlike traits as the need to love, to learn, to wonder, to know, to explore, to think, to experiment, to be imaginative, creative and curious, to sing, dance, or play. He also reveals the many links between physical and mental aging and tells how to prevent psychosclerosis, the hardening of the mind, so that we can die young--as late as possible.

Current social policy recognizes that older people should be treated as experts in their own lives and be actively involved in their care. This book explores what can be learned from older people's experiences in managing ageing. Direct connections are made between the everyday experiences and perspectives of older people, related research, and theoretical perspectives. This yields an engaging and informative analysis of how older people manage the ageing experience and what this means for policy and practice directed at promoting older people's wellbeing. The book provides an original and much-needed exploration of the strategies used by older people. It is topical and highly relevant to current issues in social policy, social work, and social care. As a unique and valuable resource for teaching, research, and practice in these areas, it provides key messages from recent and current research, relating to the experiences of older people and different aspects of community care practice.

Tabloid headlines such as 'Anti-social Feral Youth,' 'Vile Products of Welfare in the UK' and 'One in Four Adolescents is a Criminal' have in recent years obscured understanding of what social justice means for young people and how they experience it. Youth marginality in Britain offers a new perspective by promoting young people's voices and understanding the agency behind their actions. It explores different forms of social marginalisation within media, culture and society, focusing on how young people experience social discrimination at a personal and collective level. This collection from a wide range of expert contributors showcases contemporary research on multiple youth deprivation of personal isolation, social hardship, gender and ethnic discrimination and social stigma. With a foreword from Robert MacDonald, it explores the intersection of race, gender, class, asylum seeker status and care leavers in Britain, placing them in the broader context of austerity, poverty and inequality to highlight both change and continuity within young people's social and cultural identities. This timely contribution to debates concerning youth austerity in Britain is suitable for students across youth studies, sociology, education, criminology, youth work and social policy.

"Although two decades have passed since the nearly universal ratification of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, the realization of children's rights throughout much of the developing world continues to be a significant challenge. This collection of "essays from the field" combines accounts of the experiences and perspectives of marginalized children in ten developing countries with critical assessments of current child rights policies and strategies of intervention. In considering children living in arduous circumstances such as violent conflict, exploitative labor, incarceration, and institutional care, the collection also highlights the possibilities of enhancing the fundamental resiliency of children"--

The book reveals the common patterns adults experience in their careers, relationships, and development. The authors show how, by gaining an understanding of these patterns in their own lives, adults can find new meaning in their existence, work through problems, and explore opportunities for growth.

In this collection, the contributors look at the current spread of universalizing discourses concerning young children across the globe, examining the way these discourses, which purport to describe everyone in a scientific and neutral way, actually create mechanisms through which children are divided and excluded. The contributors to this book employ post-structuralist, postcolonial, and feminist theoretical frameworks.

Teen gangs are a hot issue in the United States. This volume shows the international scope of the phenomenon today. Gang activity in 14 countries, including the United States, is discussed within the larger framework of social and economic conditions. Each chapter explains the nature of the gang activity in that country; touches on the causes, such as poverty, marginalization, and self-identity problems; and heavily emphasizes the responses, including education and community-based intervention. Students and researchers will find a wealth of current information on teen gangs to mine and use for comparisons.

This volume examines children's and young people's emotions in policy-making and professional practice. It seeks both to inform readers about up-to-date research and to provoke debate, encouraging and enabling critical reflections upon emotions in policy and practice, relevant to readers' own context.

This book analyzes the memoirs of 42 'missionary kids' - the children of North American Protestant missionaries in countries all over the world during the 20th century. Using a postcolonial lens the book explores ways in which the missionary enterprise was part of, or intersected with, the Western colonial enterprise, and ways in which a colonial mindset is unconsciously manifested in these memoirs. The book explores how the memoirists' sites and experiences are exoticized; the missionary kids' likelihood of learning - or not learning - local languages; the missionary families' treatment of servants and other local people; and gender, race and social class aspects of the missionary kids' experiences. Like other Third Culture Kids, the memoirists are migrants, travelers, border-crossers and border-dwellers who alternate between insider and outsider statuses, and their words shed light on the effects of movement and travel on children's lives and development.

This unique book represents the first multi-disciplinary examination of ageing, covering everything from basic cell biology, to social participation in later life, to the representations of old age in the arts and literature. A comprehensive introductory text about the latest scientific evidence on ageing, the book draws on the pioneering New Dynamics of Ageing Programme, the UK's largest research programme in ageing. This programme brought together leading academics from across the arts and humanities, social and biological sciences and fields of engineering and medical research, to study how ageing is changing and the ways in which this process can be made more beneficial to both individuals and society. Comprising individual, local, national and global perspectives, this book will appeal to everyone with an interest in one of the greatest challenges facing the world - our own ageing.

This provocative book takes a look at children's consumption of sexualized media messages while providing parents, teachers, and professionals with strategies for abating their influence. In this eye-opening book, experienced child psychologist Jennifer W. Shewmaker contends that the manner in which a child is raised influences how they respond to media messages, particularly those shaded by sexual overtones. This text takes a hard look at the impact of advertisements, products, and entertainment on a child's psyche and offers strategies for helping kids become critical, active media consumers. Drawing from research in a wide variety of disciplines, this book explores the interpersonal factors within children's lives that impact how they learn to process sexualized media messages. The book argues that an increase in marketing to children along with media-based fabrications of beauty, masculinity, and femininity impact the confidence and character of young children who are often greatly affected by what they see and hear. The author shares invaluable tips for promoting strengths in children and adolescents of both genders and presents the protective influence of communities to help children dismiss distorted media images. Provides a quick overview of previous works in child development, communication, and education Discusses four mediating variables influencing children's values: culture of celebrity, family factors, gender, and community systems Includes an "In Their Voices" section featuring specific responses from children, adolescents, parents, and professionals Covers television, movies, music, and other media Demonstrates the impact of both positive and negative media messages

The first fully comparative empirical analysis of the relationship between education and social cohesion, this book develops a new "distributional theory" of the effects of educational inequality on social solidarity. Based on a wide-ranging theoretical critique, and extensive analysis of data on inequality and social attitudes for over 25 developed countries, the study shows how educational inequality undermines social trust, civic co-operation and the rule of law. It is not how much education a country has that matters for social cohesion but how it is distributed and the co-operative values that people learn.

"In recent years children have become an increasingly important consumer market, and there is growing concern about the commercialisation of childhood. This book sheds light on these debates, offering new empirical data and challenging critical perspectives on childrens engagement with consumer culture from a wide range of international settings"--

The complexities and tragedies arising from teen violence are problems faced on every continent in the world. Fourteen case studies of carefully selected countries, representative of every region of the world, are presented in this absorbing volume that is the first to examine the causes and possible solutions for the problem of teen violence around the world. Students and teachers can make cross-cultural comparisons to discover how the problem is viewed in different countries, how the problem is changing, which factors seem to contribute to the rate of teen violence in almost all of the countries and which are unique to specific countries. Readers can also take a fascinating look at the various solutions to the problem that have been proposed and tested throughout the world.

Each chapter is divided into similar subsections, so students can easily compare specific topics among different countries and cultures. They will find that the perception of teen violence in different countries does not always reflect the reality. They can discover how such factors as drug use, family dynamics, and educational settings play an important role in teen violence across many different cultures, while also discovering the unique settings and situations that contribute to violence in unfamiliar cultures. This world view will help build better understanding of how social issues affect all societies.

The news of teenagers and even younger children committing ever more serious and violent crimes continues to shock and baffle. The escalating psychological and social toll of youth crime is being paid by all from victims to offenders to parents and siblings to teachers and to the community as a whole. "Adolescent Reputations and Risk" looks beyond traditional theories to examine, from a solid empirical basis, the motivation and values that make some young people choose antisocial over positive behavior, resulting in potent new insights and possible solutions to this ongoing problem.

Synthesizing 15 years of research with delinquent youth, this volume describes the volatile dynamic of child and adolescent social worlds, emphasizing reputation enhancement and goal-setting as bases underlying deviant behavior. In innovative and accessible terms, "Adolescent Reputations and Risk" addresses delinquency throughout the course of childhood and adolescence, offers the first detailed explanation of delinquency by integrating goal-setting and reputation enhancement theories, provides evidence analyzing deviant trends in goal-setting and reputation enhancement terms among primary and high school students, answers key questions on topics such as impulsivity, drug and inhalant use, early-childhood psychopathy, links between ADHD and aggression, and the psychology of loners and includes current data on interventions for at-risk youth, including family and school methods, cognitive-behavioral therapy, wilderness and boot camp programs, and interactive multimedia strategies.

This volume is an essential resource for clinical child, school, and counseling psychologists; social workers; and allied education and community mental health professionals and practitioners."

A must-read book equipping you to better protect your child. Day after day the media reveal the latest cases of child abuse, but do we believe these could happen in our street, our church, our home? Policing Innocence is a ground-breaking book for any adult who cares for a child - family, professionals, church leaders and workers, friends, neighbours. Protecting children is a battle, and Policing Innocence is one of the most powerful weapons available to fight that battle. It empowers you by revealing the truth about the pervasive and invisible dangers children face in their everyday lives. Policing Innocence is the best armour you have to protect them; it is never offensive, always appropriate and totally practical. Drawing on her experience as a police officer in the Paedophile Unit, mother of two, and church member, Rebecca Andrews navigates us through a challenging yet vital issue with an entertaining style full of humour and honesty. This book is one of the most important you can read; it is unique in addressing such essential issues, and its easy-to-read style ensures that you will enjoy it. Policing Innocence has been acclaimed on nationwide BBC radio, and addresses crucial subjects like the Justice System, parenting, the Internet, grooming mechanisms, female abusers, the Sex Offenders Register and critically, why so many abusers target churches. Rebecca addresses the burning 'how does it happen' questions, and with refreshing honesty she tells us how she does her job. Policing Innocence is powerful, challenging, shocking, funny, revealing, un-missable - it is a book your child needs you to read

Statistics show that women live longer than men, and that they constitute a substantial majority of the North American population over age 50. But more research has been done on the lives of older men, and the lack of empirical data on aging women has perpetuated a number of myths and stereotypes. Twenty years ago, for example, there was a presumption that only males worked and only males retired, though women often held jobs outside the home and these jobs were sometimes their only source of income. Studies of retirement, therefore, rarely treated the experience of women. Many fallacies still remain, despite a growing body of research conducted by women investigators. This reference provides a comprehensive overview of current research on women and aging and helps correct many mistaken assumptions. Chapters are written by expert contributors and are grouped in several broad sections. The first section provides a historical and theoretical perspective on women and aging and covers topics such as sexism and ageism, representations of older women in the arts, and the attitudes of society toward aging women. The second section treats economic issues related to employment and retirement. The third section explores the psychological and physical health of women and includes related information on topics such as voluntarism and religious activity. The fourth section looks at the particular concerns of women from diverse racial and ethnic groups. It also includes a chapter on the special needs of the rural elderly. The final section studies the relationships of older women, including the impact of widowhood and the significance of friendship patterns. Each chapter cites current research and the volume closes with a selected bibliography of major studies.

This book explores the adoption of "active ageing" policies by EU15 nations and the impact on older peoples' work and retirement policy options. It explores the labor market policies (including unemployment benefits, active labor market policies and partial pension receipt) and pension policies (pension principles, early retirement and incentives for deferral) adopted by these nations from the mid-1990s onwards, addressing three main questions. First, to what extent was the EU's vision of "active ageing" adopted in EU15 nations between 1995 and 2010? Second, what was the nature of policy reforms in these nations over this time period? Finally, which sub-groups within the older age cohort were subject to active ageing policies in these countries? The data indicate convergence towards the EU-vision of active ageing is complex, with nations adopting a variety of different reforms and policy mixes, which in turn focus on different groups within the older age cohort.

A volume in The Handbook of Research in Middle Level Education series (Sponsored by the Middle Level Education Research Special Interest Group and the National Middle School Association ) Studies like the Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) have compared the performance of U.S. middle grade students (i.e., eighth graders) to those in other countries. In relation to middle grade schools, 20 countries outperformed the United States in mathematics and nine countries scored above the U.S. in science. The intent of this volume of The Handbook of Research in Middle Level Education, An International Look at Educating Young Adolescents, is to broaden our understanding of middle grade schooling by critically examining the education of young adolescents (ages 10-15, typically grades 6-8) through an international lens. In addition to looking at how schooling and students are organized for teaching and learning, this handbook will focus on the successes and failures that are evident in a wide variety of nations, present the indictments and praises that have been offered by supporters and critics alike, and review the research that has been generated about educating young adolescents in an effort to cross national boundaries. Ultimately, this volume of the handbook series will explore what international perspectives teach us about the effective education of young adolescents.