This book offers an analysis and summary of the uses, abuses and limitations of attachment theory in contemporary child welfare practice. Analysing the primary science and drawing on the authors' original empirical work, the book shows how attachment theory can distort and influence decision-making. It argues that the dominant view of attachment theory may promote a problematic diagnostic mindset, whilst undervaluing the enduring relationships between children and adults. The book concludes that attachment theory can still play an important role in child welfare practice, but the balance of the research agenda needs a radical shift towards a sophisticated understanding of the realities of human experience to inform ethical practice.

What's it like to be an adolescent today? This book explores the problems, the pressures, the opportunities, the excitement of gaining entry into the adult world. It exposes readers to the research, theory, case material, and applications in this field.

Child labour is a serious and contentious issue throughout the developing world and it continues to be a problem whose form and very meaning shifts with social, geographical, economic and cultural context. While the debate about child labour practice in developing countries appears to be motivated by growing competition in labour intensive products brought about by globalization, studies on this issue are both sparse and lopsided. This important book aims to shed light on this debate by documenting the experience of South Asian developing countries which have experienced rapid income and export growth. Based on evidence from Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, this volume aims to improve our understanding about the link between trade, growth and child labour practices, as well as management of child labour in developing countries.

This book explores how rural children negotiate economic insecurity and difference. Based on long-term ethnographic research in rural Australia, it shows that children draw on class-based ideas of moral worth, anchored in racialised and gendered understandings, to negotiate financial hardship and insecurity. Through close observations in the classroom, school yard and the home, and interviews with diverse young people, their parents and teachers, Class, Culture and Belonging in Rural Childhoods takes us deep into children's everyday struggles and their efforts to manage insecurity and belonging within a polarised economic landscape. This book offers compelling new analysis of children's experiences at a time of rapid and far-reaching change in rural communities and the world at large. This unique and engaging ethnography of rural Australia makes an important and timely contribution to wider understandings of how children navigate the precarious circumstances of the present.

Although individual parents face different issues, Sonya Charles believes most parents want their children to be good people who are happy in their adult lives. Parents and Virtues: An Analysis of Moral Development and Parental Virtue starts from the question of how parents can raise their child to be a moral and flourishing person. At first glance, readers might think this question is better left to psychologists rather than philosophers. The author proposes that Aristotle's ethical theory (known as virtue theory) has much to say on this issue. Aristotle asks how we become moral people and how that relates to leading a good life. In other words, his motivating questions are very similar to the goals parents have for their children. The first part of this book details what the basic components of Aristotle's theory can tell us about the project of parenting. In the second part, the focus shifts to consider some issues that present potential moral dilemmas for parents and discuss whether there are specific virtues we may want to use to guide parental actions. Parents and Virtues will be of particular value to scholars and students who work on the ethics of parenthood, virtue theory, and bioethics.

Children's Environmental Identity Development: Negotiating Inner and Outer Tensions in Natural World Socialization draws inspiration from environmental education, education for sustainability, environmental psychology, sociology, and child development to propose a theoretical framework for considering how children's identity in/with/for nature evolves through formative experiences. The natural world socialization of young children considers not only how the natural environment affects the growth and development of young children but also how children shape and influence natural settings. Such childhood relations with the environment are explicitly linked to familial, sociocultural, geographical, and educational contexts. While the book is theoretical and will be of interest to academics and students, the use of accessible language, vignettes, and figures will make it useful to teachers, policy-makers, parents, and others genuinely concerned with children's relationships with other humans and the natural world.

What does a child's ability to look where another is looking tell us about his or her early cognitive development? What does this ability--or lack thereof--tell us about a child's language development, understanding of other's intentions, and the emergence of autism? This volume assembles several years of research on the processing of gaze information and its relationship to early social-cognitive development in infants spanning many age groups. "Gaze-Following "examines how humans and non-human primates use another individual's direction of gaze to learn about the world around them.
The chapters throughout this volume address development in areas including joint attention, early non-verbal social interactions, language development, and theory of mind understanding. Offering novel insights regarding the significance of gaze-following, the editors present research from a neurological and a behavioral perspective, and compare children with and without pervasive developmental disorders.
Scholars in the areas of cognitive development specifically, and developmental science more broadly, as well as clinical psychologists will be interested in the intriguing research presented in this volume.

Childhood and youth have often been the targets of moral panic rhetoric. This Byte explores a series of pressing concerns about young people: child abuse, child pornography, child sexual exploitation, child trafficking and the concept of childhood. With an appraisal of the work of the influential thinker, Geoffrey Pearson, who wrote on deviance and young people, it draws attention to the moralising within these discourses and asks how we might do things differently.

This innovative collection of essays re-examines conventional ideas of the history of childhood, exploring the child's increasing prominence in eighteenth-century discourse and the establishment of the category of age as a marker of social distinction alongside race, class and gender. While scholars often approach childhood within the context of a single nation, this collection takes a comparative approach, examining the child in British, German and French contexts and demonstrating the mutual influences between the Continent and Great Britain in the conceptualization of childhood. Covering a wide range of subjects, from scientific and educational discourses on the child and controversies over the child's legal status and leisure activities, to the child as artist and consumer, the essays shed light on well-known novels like Tristram Shandy and Tom Jones, as well as on less-familiar texts such as periodicals, medical writings, trial reports and schoolbooks. Articles on visual culture show how eighteenth-century discourses on childhood are reflected in representations of the child by illustrators and portraitists. The international group of contributors, including Peter Borsay, Patricia Crown, Bernadette Fort, Brigitte Glaser, Klaus Peter Jochum, Dorothy Johnson and Peter Sabor, represent the disciplines of history, literature and art and reflect the collection's commitment to interdisciplinarity. The volume's unique range of topics makes it essential reading for students and scholars concerned with the history and representation of childhood in eighteenth-century culture.

Bringing Children Back into the Family reflects on the multi-dimensional nature of children's relationships within the home. It explores the extent to which these experiences shape children's meaning-making and how this influences how they position themselves in relation to adults. A global team of contributors paint a picture of the complexity of the family, and the extent to which understandings of 'home' are deepened by reflecting on children's experiences as social agents. The chapters and supporting case studies offer some fascinating reflections that explore home in relation to a range of themes including participation, friendship, memory, moral reflectivity, children's rights and migration. With a focus on relationality and connectedness this book reflects on the duality of structure and agency, as it examines this web of interactions and their impact on children's experiences of the home.

Concern is growing about the effectiveness of television advertising regulation in the light of technological developments in the media. The current rapid growth of TV platforms in terrestrial, sattelite, and cable formats will soon move into digital transmission. These all offer opportunities for greater commercialization through advertising on media that have not previously been exploited. In democratic societies, there is a tension between freedom of speech rights and the harm that might be done to children through commercial messages. This book explores all of these issues and looks to the future in considering how effective codes of practice and regulation will develop.

When can contexts and diversity be resources, rather than risks, for children's developmental pathways? Scholars, policy makers, and practitioners increasingly realize that middle childhood matters as a time when children's pathways diverge, as they meet new and overlapping contexts they must navigate on their way to adolescence and adulthood. This volume shines new light on this important transition by tracing how these contexts -- cultural, economic, historical, political, and social -- can support or undermine children's pathways, and how children's own actions and the actions of those around them shape these pathways. With a focus on demographic changes taking place in the U.S., the volume also maps how experiences of diversity, reflecting culture, ethnicity, gender, and social class, matter for children's life contexts and options. Chapters by a team of social scientists in the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Successful Pathways through Middle Childhood present the fruits of ten years of research on these issues with diverse cultural and ethnic communities across the U.S. These include: *a set of models and measures that trace how contexts and diversity evolve and interact over time, with an epilogue that aligns and compares them; *surprising new findings, quantitative and qualitative, with cases showing how children and families shape and are affected by their individual, recreational, institutional, and cultural experiences; and *applications to policy and practice for diverse children and families. The importance of these new models, methods, findings, and applications is the topic of commentaries by distinguished scholars with both U.S. and international perspectives. The book is intended for researchers, practitioners, and policy makers, as well as students in psychology, sociology, and education.

Following the progress of Jasmine Maya, the book examines every part of baby care and development, including: bathing, changing, clothing; health and safety, immunisation; the role of the midwife and health visitor; feeding and weaning; play, stimulation, toys and books; and theories and theorists.

African children develop aesthetic sensibilities at an early age, roughly from four to fourteen years. By the time they become full-fledged adolescents they may have had up to ten years experience with various art forms--masking, music, costuming, dancing, and performance. Aesthetic learning is vital to their maturation. The contributors to this volume argue that the idea that learning the aesthetics of a culture only occurs after maturity is false, as is the idea that children wearing masks is only play, and is not to be taken seriously. "Playful Performers" is a study of children's masquerades in Africa. The contributors describe specific cases of young children's masking in the areas of west, central, and southern Africa, which also happen to be the major areas of adult masquerading. The volume reveals the considerable creativity and ingenuity that children exhibit in preparing costumes, masks and musical instruments, and in playing music, dancing, singing, and acting. The book includes over 50 pages of black and white photographs, which illustrate and elaborate upon the authors' main points. The editors describe general categories of children's masquerades. In each of the three masking categories children's relationships to their parents and other adults differ, from a close relationship to some independence to almost complete independence. No other major work has covered this aspect of African children at this age level. The book offers a challenging perspective on young children, seeing them as active agents in their own culture rather than passive recipients of culture as taught by parents and other elders. It will be interesting reading for anthropologists, art historians, educators, and African studies specialists alike. Simon Ottenberg is emeritus professor, Department of Anthropology, University of Washington. David A. Binkley is Senior Curator for Research and Interpretation, National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC.

Children are at the heart of popular and public debates in North America and Europe about the culture of public space. On the one hand there is increased anxiety about children's vulnerability to stranger danger, on the other there is a rising tide of fear about out of control and dangerous youth. This book addresses both these debates about children's role in public space, setting them within an academic framework and drawing on a range of interdisciplinary work on childhood, young people and parenting. It is therefore relevant to practitioners and policy makers concerned with the nature and future of public space, and to academics researching or teaching about childhood, family or public space in the disciplines of sociology, social policy and geography.

The Global History of Childhood Reader provides an essential collection of chapters and articles on the global history of childhood. The Reader is structured thematically so as to provide both a representative sampling of the historiography as well as an overview of the key issues of the field, such as childhood as a social construct, commonalities and differences globally, and why the twentieth century was not the "century of the child" for most of the world s children. The Reader is divided into four parts:

Topics covered include theories and methodologies in the global history of childhood, sources for writing a global history of childhood, education, gender, disability, race, class and religion, the individual in history and emotions, violence, labour and illiteracy. With introductions that contextualize each of the four parts and the articles, further reading sections and questions; this is the perfect guide for all students of the history of childhood.

Contents:
Introduction: Thinking Critically About Social Work with Children and Families in the Early Twenty-First Century Part One: Major Departures? Social Work with Children and Families 1990-1997 1. The 'Blueprint' for Change: The 'Looking After Children' (LAC) System 2. Examining the 'Product Champions: LAC and its Continuing Role in the Remaking of Social Work with Children and Families 3. 'Working Together' to Protect Children? Part Two: Things Can Only Get Better? New Labour and Social Work with Children and Families 4. Social Work and the Third Way: The Assessment Framework, New Labour and More New 'Tools' for Social Work with Children and Families 5. An 'Eye Catching Initiative': New Labour and Child Adoption 6. Viewing the World Through a Monochrome Lens: Social Work with Children and Families and the Dominant Approach to 'Race' and Ethnicity 7. Social Work with Children and Families in a World of 'Emergent New Professionals' Conclusion

Do you remember getting up on a Saturday morning to watch Going Live? A time when scrunchies and curtains were the height of cool? Playing Sonic the Hedgehog on your Sega Mega Drive? Then the chances are you were a child in the nineties. This trip down memory lane will jog the memory of even the coolest 30-year-old, and make you long for the days when Gladiators was on the telly and the Spice Girls spiced up your life.

As Tony Blair has argued "Technology has revolutionised the way we work and is now set to transform education. Children cannot be effective in tomorrow's world if they are trained in yesterday's skills."
Cyberkids draws together research in the sociology of childhood and social studies of technology to explore children's experiences in the Information Age. The book addresses key policy debates about social inclusion and exclusion, children's identities and friendships in on-line and off-line worlds and their relationships with families and teachers. It counters contemporary moral panics about children's risk from dangerous strangers on-line, about corruption and lost innocence from adult-centred material on the web and about the addiction to life on the screen. Instead, by showing how children use ICT in balanced and sophisticated ways, the book draws out the importance of everyday uses of technology and the ways in which children's local experiences are embedded within, and in part, constitute the global.

This book is a genealogical foregrounding and performance of conceptions of children and their childhoods over time. We acknowledge that children's lives are embedded in worlds both inside and outside of structured schooling or institutional settings, and that this relationality informs how we think about what it means to be a child living and experiencing childhood. The book maps the field by taking up a cross-disciplinary, genealogical niche to offer both an introduction to theoretical underpinnings of emerging theories and concepts, and to provide hands-on examples of how they might play out. This book positions children and their everyday lived childhoods in the Anthropocene and focuses on the interface of children's being in the everyday spaces and places of contemporary communities and societies. In particular this book examines how the shift towards posthuman and new materialist perspectives continues to challenge dominant developmental, social constructivist and structuralist theoretical approaches in diverse ways, to help us to understand contemporary constructions of childhoods. It recognises that while such dominant approaches have long been shown to limit the complexity of what it means to be a child living in the contemporary world, the traditions of many Eurocentric theories have not addressed the diversity of children's lives in the majority of countries or in the Global South.

Inhabiting a whole kingdom of their own, fungi can be found in every ecosystem. They carpet the forest floor, and different types of fungi decompose matter, feed plants, and even change animals' behaviour.

Their beautiful mushrooms come in all colours, shapes, and sizes. Fungal stories include the greening of the Earth, when fungi helped plants first grow on land, and the mass destruction of crops through fungal disease. From the villains of the upcoming bananageddon to plastic-eating eco-warriors, there are over 1.5 million known fungus species, and a huge, unknown number of unnamed "dark" types. Some are even found inside animals - helpful fungi break down food in animal guts, but others take over their hosts' bodies.

This book of fabulous fungi will intrigue and amaze young readers, and open their eyes to the fungi thriving all around them.

The representation of children in modern European visual culture has often been marginalized by Art History as sentimental and trivial. For this reason the subject of childhood in relation to art and its production has largely been ignored. Confronting this dismissal, this unique collection of essays raises new and unexpected issues about the formation of childhood identity in the nineteenth century and makes a significant contribution to the development of inter-disciplinary studies within this area. Through a range of stimulating and insightful case studies, the book charts the development of the Romantic ideal of childhood, starting with Rousseau's Emile, and attends to its visual, social and psychological transformations during the historical period from which Freud's psychoanalytic theories eventually emerged. Foremost scholars such as Anne Higonnet, Carol Mavor, Susan Casteras and Linda A. Pollock uncover the means by which children became an important conduit for prevailing social anxieties and demonstrate that the apparently 'timeless' images of them that proliferated at the time should be understood as complex cultural documents. Over 50 illustrations enhance this rich and fascinating volume.

Brain asymmetry for speech is moderately related to handedness but what are the rules?
Are symmetries for hand and brain associated with characteristics such as intelligence, motor skill, spatial reasoning or skill at sports?
In this follow up to the influential Left, Right Hand and Brain (1985) Marian Annett draws on a working lifetime of research to help provide answers to crucial questions. Central to her argument is the Right Shift Theory - her original and innovative contribution to the field that seeks to explain the relationships between left-and right-handedness and left-and right-brain specialisation. The theory proposes that handedness in humans and our non-human primate relations depends on chance but that chance is weighted towards right-handedness in most people by an agent of right-hemisphere disadvantage. It argues for the existence of a single gene for right shift (RS+) that evolved in humans to aid the growth of speech in the left hemisphere of the brain.
The Right Shift Theory has possible implications for a wide range of questions about human abilities and disabilities, including verbal and non verbal intelligence, educational progress and dyslexia, spatial reasoning, sporting skills and mental illness. It continues to be at the cutting edge of research, solving problems and generating new avenues of investigation - most recently the surprising idea that a mutant RS+ gene might be involved in the causes of schizophrenia and autism.
Handedness and Brain Asymmetry will make fascinating reading for students and researchers in psychology and neurology, educationalists, and anyone with a keen interest in why people have different talents and weaknesses.

Related link: Free Email Alerting

Childhood is increasingly saturated by technology: from television to the Internet, video games to 'video nasties', camcorders to personal computers. Children, Technology and Culture looks at the interplay of children and technology which poses critical questions for how we understand the nature of childhood in late modern society. This collection brings together researchers from a range of disciplines to address the following four aspects of this relationship between children and technology:
*children's access to technologies and the implications for social relationships
*the structural contexts of children's engagement with technologies with a focus on gender and the family
*the situatedness of children's interactions with technological objects
*the constitution of children and childhood through the mediations of technology
_ This book represents a substantial contribution to contemporary social scientific thinking both about the nature of children and childhood, the social impacts of technologies and the various relationships between the two.