More young children than ever before are spending their time in some form of early childhood service. But how do we know what they think about it? While there has been a move to take children's views into account more generally, very little attention has been given to listening to young children below the age of six or seven. This book is the first of its kind to focus on listening to young children, both from an international perspective and through combining theory, practice and reflection. With contributions and examples from researchers and practitioners in six countries it examines critically how listening to young children in early childhood services is understood and practised. Each chapter is rooted in the everyday lives of young children and presents a range of actual experiences for students and practitioners to draw from. Beyond listening goes further to address key questions emerging from early childhood services and research. These are What do we mean by listening? Why listen? How do we listen to young children? What view of the child do different approaches to listening presume? What risks does listening entail for young children? The authors are leading experts in this area of rapidly growing interest and have themselves developed innovative methods such as the Mosaic approach, which is discussed in the book.

A multi-professional approach to safeguarding children, which accompanies the Department of Health's new training courses. * Focuses on the methods of identifying children at risk and details what happens at each stage of the social work process* Presents a fully multi-disciplinary approach as to how professional groups and services should co-operate to safeguard children* Part of the prestigious NSPCC Wiley Series in Safeguarding Children* Accompanies the training courses run by the DoH and NSPCC for professionals working with children

Examining the efforts of leaders in American child support, this book explores the topic of policy innovation over a 100-year period. It tracks the evolution of multiple sets of political entrepreneurs as they grapple with the child support problem: charity workers with local law enforcement in the 19th century; social workers through the 1960s; conservatives during the 1970s; women's groups and women legislators in the 1980s; and fathers' rights groups in the 1990s and beyond. Jocelyn Elise Crowley employs methodological tools from both political science and economics to highlight key stages in the innovation process.

In 1994 a group of researchers and decision makers met to discuss the state of child welfare. Also present were a few practitioners and two youth in care. Six years later, when they met again, the number of practitioners and youth had grown considerably and were joined by a strong contingent of foster parents. Thus the findings and insights presented were affirmed or challenged by those most affected -- those on the front line. It was an exciting event, worth capturing in book form. Kathleen Kufeldt and Brad McKenzie have gathered the papers presented at the 2000 Symposium and have organized them under four themes: incidence and characteristics of child maltreatment; the continuum of care; policy and practice; and future directions. An analysis and synthesis of the work informs each of these themes, while an eight-point research agenda developed in an earlier symposium is used to assess developments to date and provide guidance for the future. Contributors include many well-known researchers such as Claire Chamberland, Jim Anglin, Sally Palmer, Darlene Sykes, Cindy Blackstock, Nico Trocme, Fay Martin, and Richard Budgell. The richness of the information will interest all helping professionals, researchers, and students. It will also appeal to those whose interest has been piqued by the highly publicized failures of the system.

Enhance the social-emotional development of infants and young children with this treasure trove of learning activities, handouts, and more! Specially developed to complement ASQ:SE-2, this essential resource makes it a snap to share practical social-emotional strategies with parents of children from birth to age 6. In this book and CD-ROM set, you'll get: Social-emotional learning activities. With more than 90 fun, developmentally appropriate activities-10 per age range-you'll promote adult-child interaction and key social-emotional skills. Give them to parents after every screening to help children make progress in their social-emotional development. Newsletters for parents. Along with the activities, give parents a copy of the newsletter that corresponds to their child's age. Engaging and fun to read, these nine newsletters explain important social-emotional milestones, share tips on strengthening this area of development, and offer parents warm and encouraging words of wisdom. Topic-specific handouts. You'll get concise, age-specific one-sheets that answer parentsaEURO (TM) urgent questions about three big topics important to social-emotional development: feeding, sleeping, and calming. Also included are tip sheets on special topics such as choosing child care, establishing routines, learning to use the toilet, preparing for kindergarten, and more. Hello, Parent! letter. Use this friendly letter to introduce the handouts to families and reinforce the importance of social-emotional development. All materials are written at a fourth- to sixth-grade reading level to make them accessible to a wide range of parents. You can access and share the content in three easy ways: photocopy sheets right from the book, print full-color copies from the included CD-ROM, or email them to parents from the CD-ROM or through ASQ Online. Perfect for sharing with families of children who are developing typically or need nonintensive support with their social-emotional skills, these creative activities are an effective, low-cost way for parents and children to learn and have fun together.

"From 185 to 193 America witnessed a unique emigration and resettlement of at least 2, children and several thousand adults, primarily from the East Coast to the West. This 'placing out,' an attempt to find homes for the urban poor, was best known by the 'orphan trains' that carried the children. Holt carefully analyzes the system, initially instituted by the New York Children's Aid Society in 1853, tracking its imitators as well as the reasons for its creation and demise. She captures the children's perspective with the judicious use of oral histories, institutional records, and newspaper accounts. This well-written volume sheds new light on the multifaceted experience of children's immigration, changing concepts of welfare, and Western expansion. It is good, scholarly social history."-Library Journal

A practical tool for the assessment of children and their families, this guide enables professionals to make informed decisions about child protection issues. Firmly rooted in current practice, it draws on the expertise of a practising consultant and experienced qualified social worker Jeff Fowler, whose work has already formed the basis of guidance reports for child protection agencies and court proceedings. Providing detailed checklists for collecting and interpreting information vital to a best practice assessment, it also includes practical sections that focus on assessing attachment issues, childhood experiences, alcohol and drug abuse, and parenting skills and abilities. It presents a central case study leading to an assessment report which can be used for case conferences, as a core assessment in care proceedings, or for statements in public and private law matters. This is a helpful tool for anyone undertaking assessments but also for others who may be involved in aspects of child protection work such as social workers, health professionals, teachers, and legal and criminal justice professionals.

What is the social cost of privatising public services? And what effect has the failure of previous privatisations had on their provision? This book, by best-selling author and expert social worker Ray Jones, is the first to tell the story of how crucial social work services, including those for families and children, are now being out-sourced to private companies. Detailing how the failures of previous privatisations have led to the deterioration of services for the public, it shows how this trend threatens the safety and wellbeing of vulnerable children and disabled adults.

This book is a call to action to parents, youth workers, policymakers -- anyone who works for and worries about the next generation -- to recognize and promote the values of caring in public and private life. It is about teenagers -- those who no longer need the care given to babies and children but who still need support and guidance. Diana Mendley Rauner offers a rare focus on youth development as a process of experiencing care and learning social responsibility.

Much public discussion of youth focuses on individual achievement and a limited set of markers of success, on the one hand, and increasingly punitive responses to failure on the other. Missing from these discussions is an appreciation for the importance of caring and social responsibility both in the environments we create for young people and in our expectations of how they should act and what they should become.

""They Still Pick Me Up When I Fall" "develops ideals for caring interaction, articulating specific behaviors and habits for practitioners as well as policies and practices that characterize caring organizations and caring societies. Each chapter begins with a profile of a youth-serving organization, drawn from the fields of education, youth work, and counseling. Throughout, an intellectual framework for care is interwoven with the voices and experiences of the youth workers and young people involved in the struggle to create a caring society.

Nearly forty years after researchers first sought to determine the effects, if any, on children adopted by families whose racial or ethnic background differed from their own, the debate over transracial adoption continues. In this collection of interviews conducted with black and biracial young adults who were adopted by white parents, the authors present the personal stories of two dozen individuals who hail from a wide range of religious, economic, political, and professional backgrounds. How does the experience affect their racial and social identities, their choice of friends and marital partners, and their lifestyles? In addition to interviews, the book includes overviews of both the history and current legal status of transracial adoption.

The figure of the lost child has haunted the Australian imagination. Peter Pierce's original and sometimes shocking study The Country of Lost Children traces this ambivalent and disturbing history. Drawing on a wide range of sources, from poetry, fiction and newspaper reports to paintings and films, The Country of Lost Children analyzes the cultural and moral implications of the lost child in Australian history and illuminates a crucial aspect of our present condition. At its core are confronting, often troubling, questions about childhood itself.

What does it mean to be a child or an adolescent growing up on the streets or in a state institution? How do children define their everyday lives in the midst of global processes? This ethnographic study situates childhood and adolescence as social forms within the changing family and political structures of the complex urban world of Caracas, Venezuela.
The presence of youngsters on the streets of Caracas embodies social contradictions at the national level, and this book discusses how these contradictions are played out in an oil-producing nation afflicted with hyperinflation, generalized corruption, the deterioration of public services, increasing poverty, and violence. Vivid life stories told by street children themselves portray their relations with family and friends, as well as with people they encounter: police officers, journalists, social workers, and passersby at their local hangouts. The book also describes and analyzes the justice system and institutions for minors, illustrating the constant failures to respond to, contain, or lessen youth violence.
Many young people come from shantytowns to the streets of Caracas for a better life, and the author shows how they seek status and power through style, pursuing commodities of the global consumer market, from Nike shoes to cellular phones. Drawing on her ethnographic data and contemporary theories of power, control, and style, the author critiques the inequalities of the Venezuelan class structure and the oil boom's failure to provide adequate social services for a great majority of the population.

Family abduction is the most prevalent form of child abduction in the United States. Regardless of the abductor's motive, it is an illegal act that has lasting consequences for the abducted child, the custodial parent and the abducting family member. Written with the help of six persons who have experienced family abduction, this book features valuable insights from a firsthand perspective. It is designed to provide the searching family, law enforcement and mental health professionals with strategies to build a comprehensive, child-centred approach to recovery and healing, and to support victims subjected to the crime of family abduction.

This book highlights a report to Congress which outlines the findings of two adoption-research studies conducted as part of The Collaboration to AdoptUsKids. In the first study, a nationwide purposive sample of 300 families seeking to adopt children with special needs from the public child welfare system was selected, interviewed and surveyed to determine actual and potential barriers to the completion of the adoption process. In the second study, a four-year prospective examination of a nationwide sample of 161 families who had adopted children with special needs was conducted in order to determine factors that contributed to successful adoption outcomes.

The Kindness of Strangers tells the story of a group of concerned adults who mentor inner-city youth. It describes what volunteers can do to ameliorate the conditions of young people living in poverty. It chronicles the rise of the mentoring movement and examines its wider implications for education and social policy. Based on interviews with over 300 mentors, young people, scholars, and youth workers, The Kindness of Strangers takes a hard look at mentoring and asks some critical questions: How much can mentoring really accomplish? What does it take to be a successful mentor? What makes the difference between an effective program and one fraught with difficulties? Marc Freedman brings experience, research, and realism to these questions in an effort to present the truth about the mentoring movement sweeping America today. This revised edition contains a new introduction that highlights research that has been conducted since the original publication of the book in 1993. Marc Freedman is President of Civic Ventures, a research and development organization based in Berkeley, California. He has studied education and social policy for more than a decade and prior to starting Civic Ventures he was director of special projects for Public/Private Ventures, an organization focused on helping young people in poverty.

This is the first hands-on guide for providing health and mental health care to lesbian and gay youth and young adults. Although it focuses on adolescents, the information is relevant for any age group. In addition to specific guidelines for care and for approaching such sensitive topics as sexual behavior, substance abuse, and suicide, the book includes a comprehensive review of the literature and the most up-to-date information for providers, researchers, educators, and general readers alike. This book also includes the first guidelines (clinical care protocols) on primary care, mental health care, HIV medical and psychosocial care for lesbian and gay youth, and HIV counseling and testing for adolescents. There is extensive discussion of the social and health effects of stigmatized identity in the context of adolescent development.

Drawing on over twenty years of child welfare experience and extensive interviews with 54 gay and lesbian young people who lived in out-of-home-care child welfare settings in three North American cities -- Los Angeles, New York, and Toronto -- Gerald Mallon presents narratives of marginalized young people trying to find the "right fit." Mallon permits the voices of these young people to guide the research, allowing them to tell their own stories and to suggest what is important in their own words. Their experiences help the reader to begin to understand the discrepancies between the myths and misinformation about gay and lesbian adolescents and their realities in the out-of-home child welfare systems in which they live.

The first comprehensive examination of the experiences of gay and lesbian youths in the child welfare system, "We Don't Exactly Get the Welcome Wagon" makes solid recommendations to social work practitioners as well as to policy makers about how they can provide a competent practice for gay and lesbian adolescents, and offers a methods chapter which will be useful in classroom instruction.

The nation's future depends to a larger extent on its children's ability to develop into contributing adult members of society. For that reason, and for what many would consider a society's moral obligation to care for the young and vulnerable, Congress and the nation take an interest in promoting children's well-being. Their well-being and ability to develop into productive adults in an increasingly competitive global economy is influenced by a variety of factors and public policies. This book discusses topics such as child well-being and the non-custodial father; child support enforcement and ex-offenders; parents in prison and their minor children, as well as child welfare agencies' efforts to identify, locate and involve non-resident fathers.

In 1996, America abolished its long-standing welfare system in favor of a new and largely untried public assistance program. Welfare as we knew it arose in turn from a previous generation's rejection of an even earlier system of aid. That generation introduced welfare in order to eliminate orphanages.

This book examines the connection between the decline of the orphanage and the rise of welfare. Matthew Crenson argues that the prehistory of the welfare system was played out not on the stage of national politics or class conflict but in the micropolitics of institutional management. New arrangements for child welfare policy emerged gradually as superintendents, visiting agents, and charity officials responded to the difficulties that they encountered in running orphanages or creating systems that served as alternatives to institutional care.

Crenson also follows the decades-long debate about the relative merits of family care or institutional care for dependent children. Leaving poor children at home with their mothers emerged as the most generally acceptable alternative to the orphanage, along with an ambitious new conception of social reform. Instead of sheltering vulnerable children in institutions designed to transform them into virtuous citizens, the reformers of the Progressive era tried to integrate poor children into the larger society, while protecting them from its perils.

This book, now in a revised edition, is a political history of child care in Australia from the 1890s to the 1990s. Once provided by philanthropic groups and available only to those deemed underprivileged, child care has now become part of the mainstream political agenda. Deborah Brennan provides an in-depth analysis of policy developments in this significant area since the Commonwealth became involved in 1972. The revised edition provides a detailed analysis of the shifts in policy under Labor as well as an up-to-date account of developments under the Howard government since 1996.

The poverty rate for children in the United States exceeds that of all other Western, industrialised nations except Australia. Moreover, poverty among children has increased substantially since 1970, affecting more than one-fifth of US children. These persistent high rates require new ideas in both research and public policy. Escape from Poverty presents such ideas. Four modes of possible change are addressed: mothers' employment, child care, father involvement, and access to health care. It examines the implications of these new policy-driven changes for children. The editors have developed an interdisciplinary perspective, involving demographers, developmental psychologists, economists, health experts, historians, and sociologists - a framework essential for addressing the complexities inherent in the links between the lives of poor adults and children in our society.

This book is about infant mortality decline, the rise of the infant welfare movement, outcomes in terms of changing priorities in child health and what happened to mothers and babies. Infant welfare raised public awareness but did not contribute as powerfully to improved infant survival - and so longer life - as protagonists claimed. This work shows what it meant for reformers, babies and mothers when the call was 'population is power: the nation that has the babies has the future'.

Each year, there are over 58,000 non-family abductions and more than 1 million children reported missing. This is a staggering number, but it doesn't include the other young victims, the sisters and brothers of those who have been abducted. These overlooked children suffer the loss of their sibling. Their lives are turned assunder, and family patterns are irrevocably changed. Additionally, when a child is abducted by a family member, the parent who has been left behind faces seemingly insurmountable obstacles.

This book provides analysis, recommendations and laws on youth safety on the internet and explores a host of collaborative and multi-faceted initiatives and approaches to enhance online safety via innovation and co-operation.

This book provides an interdisciplinary projection of the factors affecting the lives of Europe's children in the coming decades. It is a sequel to a volume of the same name, published in 1979. Europe is undergoing dramatic changes, demographic, political and technological, which will influence the health, well-being and potential of children. Children are an ever diminishing proportion of the population and their interests rank low on the agenda of most countries. Efforts to improve the quality of their life tend to be uni-dimensional, focusing on a specific group or undertaken by a specific discipline. The absence of co-operation, coordination or even communication between professionals involved with children and families results in inappropriateness, inaccessibility and ineffectiveness of programmes for children and their families. Lack of advocacy for children results in priority being given to other groups.

This book brings together professionals and researchers from a wide range of disciplines (maternal and child health, genetics, psychology, psychiatry, social sciences, epidemiology, city planning, education, law etc.), who participated in a conference, discussed the issues and contributed chapters on topics which appear to be of greatest importance, or to present new challenges, for the healthy development of Europe's children and their passage into a satisfying and productive adulthood. The chapters are arranged in five sections dealing with family, environment, health, education and state, with a final section covering the overall projections. Reference is made to the predictions made in the earlier volume, and the success or failure in basing action on thosepredictions, and special emphasis is given to children with special needs.