Researching Children and Youth: Methodological Issues, Strategies, and Innovations, part of the Sociological Studies of Children and Youth series, seeks to fill a void in current publications directly addressing the problems and pitfalls that often accompany researching children and youth in today's society. Sociologists face increasingly limited access to children and youth given their "vulnerable" status, growing requirements from Institutional Review Boards, and more restricted access from organizations and educational institutions. As a result, researchers must be creative in the pursuit of researching kids and teens. Chapters in this volume address such topics as participatory and feminist ethnographic approaches, digital mining, children's agency, and navigating IRBs. The importance of contextualizing sociological research with children with special consideration of space, location, and identity thematically runs throughout all of the contributions to this volume.

There have been important developments in the study and treatment of selective mutism during the ten years since the first edition of this book was published. Understanding of the subject has improved more dramatically than in any period since the phenomenon of children who talk readily in some situations but not in others was first recognised over a century ago.

The second edition of this practical book reports recent developments in medication and combined therapies. New findings on the links between social anxiety, biological and genetic factors and selective mutism are described. At the same time the authors remain committed to understanding this pattern of behaviour in its full social context in family and community and to employing behavioural approaches to intervention alongside other methods.

This is the fullest and most authoritative book-length account of selective mutism in print.

This is the first book in any language to explore the cultural connotations of childhood in the early phases of Chinese history. Drawing upon both traditional and archeological materials, this study encompasses the stages of human development that begin with the embryo and extend to late adolescence. While texts from China's most ancient period scarcely mention children, rather suddenly, in Han times (206 BC-AD 220), the written record begins to feature fairly detailed references to children and the childhoods of famous figures. The aim of this book is to identify the cultural conditions that place children and childhood near the center of intellectual debate during this period. These conditions are related to the establishment of a centralized empire and are expressed in the discourse surrounding cosmology, medicine, law, statecraft, and-most important-dynastic history. The book describes the dangers that haunted children of high status, with the rules of succession, shifting power structures at court, and traditional views on patriarchy and parental authority (including the right of life and death over children) contributing to their vulnerability.

The results of this report from a major international research project, funded by UNICEF, on child rights and child poverty in the developing world are shocking. They show that over one billion children - more than half the children in developing countries - suffer from severe deprivation of basic human need and over a third (674 million) suffer from absolute poverty. The study's findings indicate that considerably more emphasis needs to be placed on improving basic infrastructure and social services for families with children, particularly with regards to shelter, sanitation and safe drinking water in rural areas. Anti-poverty strategies need to respond to local conditions, as blanket solutions to eradicating child poverty will be unsuccessful. (REPORT)

Nourish Your Child for Optimum health and well-being

All parents want to do the very best for the long-term health and well-being of their children, and nutrition plays a major role in that process. This book shows you where to start. Drawing on the latest medical and dietary research, Healthy Eating for Life for Children presents a complete and sensible plant-based nutrition program that can help you promote and maintain excellent health and good eating habits for your children throughout their lives.

Covering all stages of childhood from birth through adolescence, this book provides detailed nutritional guidelines that have been carefully drafted by an expert panel of Physicians Committee doctors and nutritionists, along with 91 delicious, easy-to-make recipes to help you put these healthy eating principles to work right away. Healthy Eating for Life for Children contains important information on:

• Eating for two–nutrition in pregnancy
• Worry-free breast- feeding and bottle-feeding options
• Nutrition for hyperactivity and attention problems
• Eating disorders and body image issues
• Achieving healthy weight and fitness levels
• Healthy eating for young athletes
• And more

Whether you are a new or experienced parent, this book will give you the crucial knowledge you need to take charge of your child’s diet and health.

Also available:

Healthy Eating for Life to Prevent and Treat Cancer (0-471-43597-X)
Healthy Eating for Life to Prevent and Treat Diabetes (0-471-43598-8)
Healthy Eating for Life for Women (0-471-43596-1)

Little is known about the experiences of children living in families affected by severe and enduring mental illness. This is the first in-depth study of children and young people caring for parents affected in this way. Drawing on primary research data collected from 40 families, the book presents the perspectives of children (young carers), their parents and the key professionals in contact with them. Children caring for parents with mental illness makes an invaluable contribution to the growing evidence base on parental mental illness and outcomes for children. It: * is the first research-based text to examine the experiences and needs of children caring for parents with severe mental illness; * provides the perspectives of children, parents and key professionals in contact with these families; * reviews existing medical, social, child protection and young carers literatures on parental mental illness and consequences for children; * provides a chronology and guide to relevant law and policy affecting young carers and parents with severe mental illness; * makes concrete recommendations and suggestions for improving policy and professional practice; * contributes to the growing evidence base on parental mental illness and outcomes for children and families.

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.

Each generation of American children across the tumultuous 20th-century has come of age in a very different world. How do major historical events - such as war or the depression - influence children's development? Children in Time and Place brings together social historians and developmentalists to explore the implications of a changing society for children's growth and life chances. Transitions provide a central theme, from historical transitions to the social transitions of children and their developmental experiences. The book has two stories to tell, one about children growing up and coming of age in various times and places, and another about how collaboration worked across the disciplines of history and psychology. Children in Time and Place begins with studies that link historical and life transitions in children's lives, with an emphasis on wartime experience. It turns to studies of historical variation in the effect of life transitions, from the onset of sexual experience in girl's lives to the transition to fatherhood in boys, and it concludes by introducing the reader to the collaborative efforts involved in the workshop that led to the volume.

This book, the first academic study of its kind, uncovers a history of the child television audience. Looking in detail at children's television and its audience in Britain in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, the book shows how an audience literally came into being, how it was given substance, and how it became the site of intervention.

"This anthology is breathtaking in its geographic and temporal sweep."--"Canadian Journal of History"

The American media has recently "discovered" children's experiences in present-day wars. A week-long series on the plight of child soldiers in Africa and Latin America was published in "Newsday" and newspapers have decried the U.S. government's reluctance to sign a United Nations treaty outlawing the use of under-age soldiers. These and numerous other stories and programs have shown that the number of children impacted by war as victims, casualties, and participants has mounted drastically during the last few decades.

Although the scale on which children are affected by war may be greater today than at any time since the world wars of the twentieth century, children have been a part of conflict since the beginning of warfare. Children and War shows that boys and girls have routinely contributed to home front war efforts, armies have accepted under-aged soldiers for centuries, and war-time experiences have always affected the ways in which grown-up children of war perceive themselves and their societies.

The essays in this collection range from explorations of childhood during the American Revolution and of the writings of free black children during the Civil War to children's home front war efforts during World War II, representations of war and defeat in Japanese children's magazines, and growing up in war-torn Liberia. Children and War provides a historical context for two centuries of children's multi-faceted involvement with war.

Burns and Hoagwood bring together original articles by some of the country's leading experts on children's mental health services to create an outstanding text exploring innovative community interventions for youth with serious emotional disorders. These community-based interventions include home-based services, intensive case management, crisis care, therapeutic foster care, therapeutic group homes and community mentors. Part of the series on Innovations in Practice and Service Delivery with Vulnerable Populations, this book will be a needed reference for mental health workers and researchers in children's mental health, and an outstanding text for courses in community mental health and the mental health of children and adolescents.

A child's capacity to cope with adversity and 'stand on their own two feet' is seen as critical to their development, well-being, and future independence and success in adulthood. Psychological strength, or resilience, directly affects a child's capacity to cope with adversity. This book provides a succinct, accessible and clear guide on how to promote resilience in children and achieve positive developmental outcomes for them. The author covers three key factors that affect resiliency: vulnerability to stress and anxiety, attachment relationships, and access to basic needs. For each, the author presents practical advice and strategies, such as how to regulate children's stress and anxiety, how to encourage and maintain secure attachments, and how to assure children that their needs are understood and will be met. The model presented will help parents and carers ensure their children grow up happy, healthy and resilient. This book will be invaluable for parents, carers and practitioners in supportive roles caring for children.

Denmark is one of the most progressive countries in terms of family support policies. This book, however, reveals a backdrop of diminished rights, inequalities and family violence in the lives of vulnerable lone mothers. If this is the case in Denmark, what is the situation in other countries, including the USA, the UK and other EU member states? Diminished rights is a unique qualitative study that documents the daily lives of vulnerable lone mothers and their children in Denmark. Loss of rights, gender and ethnic inequality, and family violence all emerge as key themes, with far-reaching international implications. The book: * presents vivid case stories to illuminate the voices and experiences of the women involved in the study; * identifies lone mothers as part of an emerging post-modern underclass in Denmark; * highlights the disturbing prevalence of domestic violence that pervades many lone mothers' lives; * raises questions around legal and child custody rights and the lack of redress in a patriarchal justice system. Policy and practice recommendations are made with wide-ranging applications for an international audience of policy makers, practitioners and academics.

This is the definitive examination of adolescent violence in the United States as both a social phenomenon and a policy problem. Franklin Zimring, one of America's most esteemed scholars of law and crime, scrutinized criminal statistics and demographic trends. The result is a thorough debunking of Congressional predictions of "a coming storm of juvenile violence" and the half-baked policy proposals that accompany such warnings. The book sets forth comprehensive and dispassionate analyses of three key areas of youth violence policy: adolescent firearms possession and use, standards for transfer from juvenile to criminal court jurisdiction, and legal sanctions for adolescents who kill. Throughout American Youth Violence, the core issues of youth violence in the 1990s are examined with an unprecedented degree of analytic rigour. Zimring also offers an appropriate set of responses to youth violence that are consistent with a positive future for the juvenile court and for American youth.

Can White parents teach their Black children African American culture and history? Can they impart to them the survival skills necessary to survive in the racially stratified United States? Concerns over racial identity have been at the center of controversies over transracial adoption since the 1970s, as questions continually arise about whether White parents are capable of instilling a positive sense of African American identity in their Black children.

" An] empathetic study of meanings of cross-racial adoption to adoptees"
"--Law and Politics Book Review, Vol. 11, No. 11, Nov. 2001"

Through in-depth interviews with adult transracial adoptees, as well as with social workers in adoption agencies, Sandra Patton, herself an adoptee, explores the social construction of race, identity, gender, and family and the ways in which these interact with public policy about adoption. Patton offers a compelling overview of the issues at stake in transracial adoption. She discusses recent changes in adoption and social welfare policy which prohibit consideration of race in the placement of children, as well as public policy definitions of "bad mothers" which can foster coerced aspects of adoption, to show how the lives of transracial adoptees have been shaped by the policies of the U.S. child welfare system.

Neither an argument for nor against the practice of transracial adoption, BirthMarks seeks to counter the dominant public view of this practice as a panacea to the so-called "epidemic" of illegitimacy and the misfortune of infertility among the middle class with a more nuanced view that gives voice to those directly involved, shedding light on the ways in which Black and multiracial adoptees articulate their own identity experiences.

The new edition of this well established handbook provides up-to-date information on a topic of increasing importance across a range of disciplines and practices. It covers:
* the debate concerning children's rights and developments in rights provision over the last twenty years
* the impact of recent British legislation on children's rights in key areas such as education, social and welfare services and criminal justice
* the key provisions of the Un Convention and Human Rights Act
* recent policy proposals and initiatives in the British setting intended to establish and promote rights for children and young people
* the rights claims of particular groups of children, for example children who are carers or children who are disabled
* children's claims for particular rights such as the right to space, to sex education and citizenship
* the ways in which the voices of children and young people are or might be articulated more clearly in policy debates and other arenas
* issues and developments in Europe, Scandinavia and China.
The New Handbook of Children's Rights offers a comprehensive and radical appraisal of the field which will be invaluable to students and professionals alike.

"Sociologists will appreciate [CAtA(c)'s] attempt at showing the social and structural roots of and consequences for unbridled consumerism."
--"Contemporary Sociology"

Why are today's adults more like adolescents, in their dress and personal tastes, than ever before? Why do so many adults seem to drift and avoid responsibilities such as work and family? As the traditional family breaks down and marriage and child rearing are delayed, what makes a person an adult?

Many people in the industrial West are simply not "growing up" in the traditional sense. Instead, they pursue personal, individual fulfillment and emerge from a vague and prolonged youth into a vague and insecure adulthood. The transition to adulthood is becoming more hazardous, and the destination is becoming more difficult to reach, if it is reached at all.

Arrested Adulthood examines the variety of young people's responses to this new situation. James E. CAtA(c) shows us adults who allow the profit-driven industries of mass culture to provide the structure that is missing, as their lives become more individualistic and atomized. He also shows adults who resist anomie and build their world around their sense of personal connectedness to others. Finally, CAtA(c) provides a vision of a truly progressive society in which all members can develop their potentials apart from the influence of the market. In so doing, he gives us a clearer vision of what it means to be an adult and makes sense of the longest, but least understood period of the life course.

This work examines how children's bodies are constructed in schools, families, courts, hospitals and in film. Recognizing that children's bodies are a target for adult practices of social regulation, the contributors show that children are also active in their construction, employ them in resistance and social action, and generate their own meanings about them. The editor, a sociologist of childhood, draws out the theoretical implications of this work, indicates the limits of social constructionism, and suggests new ways of thinking about the hybrid of material, discursive and collective processes involved.

Children are one of the major audiences for museums, but their visits are often seen solely from the point of view of museum learning. In Snapshots of Museum Experience, Will Buckingham draws upon Elee Kirk's research amongst child visitors to the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, to take a different approach. Using a method of photo-elicitation with four-and five-year-old child visitors to the museum, the book investigates children's experience of the museum, and in the process undermines many of our assumptions about the interests, needs and demands of child museum visitors. Drawing together the fields of museum studies and childhood studies, the book considers children as active creators of the museum visit. It investigates the way that children navigate and take control of the physical and social spaces of the museum, finding their own idiosyncratic pathways through these spaces. It also explores how elements of the museum 'light up', becoming salient to the child visitor. Finally, it investigates how children make sense through intellectually and imaginatively engaging with these elements of the museum visit. Snapshots of Museum Experience gives a unique insight into the sheer diversity of children's museum experiences and discusses how museums might cater more successfully to the needs of their child visitors. As such, it should be of great interest to academics, researchers and students in the fields of museum studies, visitor studies and childhood studies. It should also be essential reading for museum educators and exhibition designers.

Free Teacher's Guide available for Childhood in America! An essential collection of sources on American childhood for teachers Childhood in America is a unique compendium of sources on American childhood that has many options for classroom adoptions and can be tailored to individual course needs. Because the subject of childhood is both relatively new on campuses and now widely recognized as vital to a range of specialties, the editors have prepared a Teacher's Guide to assist you in making selections appropriate for your courses. Collecting a vast array of selections from past and present- from colonial ministers to Drs. Benjamin Spock and T. Berry Brazelton, from the poems of Anne Bradstreet to the writings of today's young people- Childhood in America brings to light the central issues surrounding American children. Eleven sections on childbirth through adolescence explore a cornucopia of issues, and each section has been carefully selected and introduced by the editors.

This book uses an ethnographic, cross-cultural approach to study everyday life in secondary schools in London and Helsinki. Employing a metaphor of dance, it explores the relationship between the official school (correct steps), the informal school (improvised steps) and the physical school (the ballroom). Practices and processes of differentiation, marginalisation and of co-operation are explored in relation to gender and its intersections with social class and ethnicity. The concluding question 'who are the wallflowers?' is addressed through a critique of New Right politics and policies in education.

Following the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989), the case for children's involvement in decision-making processes has been championed by pressure groups and voluntary organisations. Planning with children for better communities argues that there is now a need to transfer these ideas and experiences to mainstream services of local authorities, regeneration agencies and other organisations. In addition to clarifying why the issue of children's participation should be prioritised, the authors use examples and case studies from a variety of professions and disciplines in order to explain different methods which can be used to support participation. The book: analyses children's and young people's contemporary place in local communities; locates debates about children's and young people's participation in local communities within government social and economic policy; captures children's and young people's views and experiences of community life. The authors conclude that there should be greater recognition of the right of children to determine significant decisions affecting them - children have a clear entitlement to involvement in key decisions which influence their lives. Planning with children for better communities is important reading for local authority planners and policy makers, project workers, community development workers, children's rights officers, youth workers, play workers and students of social and community work and politics. It should also be read by those people in the voluntary and community sector concerned with children's issues relating to planning and community development.

In the Beveridge Lecture, delivered on 18 March 1999, Prime Minister Tony Blair committed his government to abolishing child poverty within 20 years. He concluded that the present-day welfare state is not fitted to the modern world, and laid out his vision for a welfare state for the 21st century. Blair's vision, grounded in a particular conception of social justice, is perhaps as challenging as the blueprint laid down by Beveridge. Ending child poverty presents Blair's Beveridge Lecture alongside the views of some of Britain's foremost policy analysts and commentators. This unique collection makes it possible to not only read the ideas of leading current thinkers in this critical area of policy, but also to compare them with the Prime Minister's lecture, and to see which ideas he himself took up and in what form. Ending child poverty is a record of not only the Lecture itself, but also of the ideas available to government and their influence on its leader at an important moment in the formation of policy. It provides a rich tapestry on analysis, insight and reflection that will, it is to be hoped, stimulate critical debate about the future shape of British welfare. This collection is essential reading for anyone interested in the future of modern society and politics and provides an accessible handbook for undergraduate students of politics, social policy and sociology.

This book was first published in 1990. In Australia, as in other Western societies, young people are facing a crisis. Structural changes in the economy have fundamentally altered the transition from child to adult. Many young people must choose between exploited labour and crime. Rob White cuts through the political rhetoric and media images of young people, and exposes the underlying trends of society's response to the 'youth problem'. He shows how well-meaning programmes intended to 'help' young people in fact serve as agents of social control, reducing and regulating the space they can occupy. All around Australia, governments are treating the symptoms but ignoring the causes. The school system, training programmes, youth workers, campaigns against drug abuse and crime - all exert pressure on young people to conform to the demands of a society in which they have no say.