How does the built environment affect children - their health, their behaviour, education and development? To support them, what do we need to consider and what do we need to do? Can our surroundings foster environmental and social awareness and responsibility?
Based on Christopher Day's experiences designing schools and early childhood centres in the United States and Britain, this groundbreaking book sets out to answer these questions and to offer solutions.
Children all too often find themselves living in alien surroundings designed with the needs of adults in mind, cut off not just from the natural environment but also childhood itself. Society's reaction - to cocoon children from the outside world or to resort to drugs to control behaviour - fails to address the fundamental causes of problems which lie in the environment not the children themselves.
One of the world's leading thinkers on the impact of buildings on people, Christopher Day's insights offer new light on one of the most important issues for today's society.
* Groundbreaking study of the impact of the built environment on children's health and behaviour
* What our surroundings teach our children
* Designing environments that nourish imagination and creativity

This volume contains a series of articles that examine the Roman family in Italy and the empire using a wide range of evidence and considering a number of critical issues. Its focus on regional differences in family structure, forms of marriage, and kinship patterns make it the first publication to include targeted study of the family in the Roman provinces. The chapters cover Roman Egypt, Judaea, Spain, Gaul, North Africa, and Pannonia, and make use of both conventional textual sources and epigraphic evidence and material that is less frequently treated, including the medical writers and the Justinianic receipts.

In the vast anthropological literature devoted to hunter-gatherer societies, surprisingly little attention has been paid to the place of hunter-gatherer children. Children often represent 40 percent of hunter-gatherer populations, thus nearly half the population is omitted from most hunter-gatherer ethnographies and research. This volume is designed to bridge the gap in our understanding of the daily lives, knowledge, and development of hunter-gatherer children.

The twenty-six contributors to Hunter-Gatherer Childhoods use three general but complementary theoretical approaches--evolutionary, developmental, cultural--in their presentations of new and insightful ethnographic data. For instance, the authors employ these theoretical orientations to provide the first systematic studies of hunter-gatherer children's hunting, play, infant care by children, weaning and expressions of grief. The chapters focus on understanding the daily life experiences of children, and their views and feelings about their lives and cultural change. Chapters address some of the following questions: why does childhood exist, who cares for hunter-gatherer children, what are the characteristic features of hunter-gatherer children's development and what are the impacts of culture change on hunter-gatherer child care?

The book is divided into five parts. The first section provides historical, theoretical and conceptual framework for the volume; the second section examines data to test competing hypotheses regarding why childhood is particularly long in humans; the third section expands on the second section by looking at who cares for hunter-gatherer children; the fourth section explores several developmental issues such as weaning, play and loss of loved ones; and, the final section examines the impact of sedentism and schools on hunter-gatherer children.

This pioneering volume will help to stimulate further research and scholarship on hunter-gatherer childhoods, thereby advancing our understanding of the way of life that characterized most of human history and of the processes that may have shaped both human development and human evolution.

Rooted in the crisis over slavery, disagreements about child labor broke down along sectional lines between the North and South. For decades after emancipation, the child labor issue shaped how Northerners and Southerners defined fundamental concepts of American life such as work, freedom, the market, and the state.Betsy Wood examines the evolution of ideas about child labor and the on-the-ground politics of the issue against the backdrop of broad developments related to slavery and emancipation, industrial capitalism, moral and social reform, and American politics and religion. Wood explains how the decades-long battle over child labor created enduring political and ideological divisions within capitalist society that divided the gatekeepers of modernity from the cultural warriors who opposed them. Tracing the ideological origins and the politics of the child labor battle over the course of eighty years, this book tells the story of how child labor debates bequeathed an enduring legacy of sectionalist conflict to modern American capitalist society.

DK brings you a beautifully illustrated and engaging book to teach young readers how to protect our planet and change the world! Introducing It's a Wonderful World - a captivating storybook set out to encourage children to look after the world around them, one step at a time. Celebrate your child's curiosity as they navigate through this perfect conservation book to discover all the wonderful ways to protect and preserve the biodiversity of the natural world, whilst learning about the main challenges our planet faces today. An empowering and practical guide o looking after our planet, your child can discover: -An excellent introduction to nature conservation for young readers -A unique guide to studying different ecosystems and the biodiversity within the environment -Graphic illustrations to complement stunning photography featured throughout -An enthralling insight into lesser-known animals that inhabit the natural world Did you know that more than 50% of child psychologists in England are currently seeing patients distressed about the state of the environment? It's time to change that! Invest in this all-encompassing environment book and shape your child's learning for the better. Proving to be an excellent education tool for children aged 7-9, this is a must-have volume for any young reader with a passion for protecting the planet, whether it's researching plastic pollution or studying snow leopards, this nature book for kids really does have it all. At DK, we believe in the power of discovery. So let us quench your thirst for knowledge and teach you a trick or two about balance and biodiversity along the way! One book at a time, we believe you can change the world!

Toy Stories: Analyzing the Child in Nineteenth-Century Literature explores the stakes of recurrent depictions of children’s violent, damaging, and tenuously restorative play with objects within a long nineteenth century of fictional and educational writing. As Vanessa Smith shows us, these scenes of aggression and anxiety cannot be squared with the standard picture of domestic childhood across that period. Instead, they seem to attest to the kinds of enactments of infant distress we would normally associate with post-psychoanalytic modernity, creating a ripple effect in the literary texts that nest them: regressing developmental narratives, giving new value to wooden characters, exposing Realism’s solid objects to odd fracture, and troubling distinctions between artificial and authentic interiority. Toy Stories is the first study to take these scenes of anger and overwhelm seriously, challenging received ideas about both the nineteenth century and its literary forms. Radically re-conceiving nineteenth-century childhood and its literary depiction as anticipating the scenes, theories, and methodologies of early child analysis, Toy Stories proposes a shared literary and psychoanalytic discernment about child’s play that in turn provides a deep context for understanding both the “development” of the novel and the keen British uptake of Melanie Klein’s and Anna Freud’s interventions in child therapy. In doing so, the book provides a necessary reframing of the work of Klein and Freud and their fractious disagreement about the interior life of the child and its object-mediated manifestations.

Prompted by the question, "What would children's lives have been like if these people had not lived?" Shapers of American Childhood: Essays on Visionaries from L. Frank Baum to J.K. Rowling explores individuals in literature, media, health, business, and other areas who impacted childhood in the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries. Ranging from the recognizable, such Walt Disney and Benjamin Spock, to the less well-known, such as Ernest Thompson Seton and Augusta Braxton Baker, these people left indelible marks on children's culture as we know it today. Often controversial for their time, their ideas transformed American life, contributing to the ideal of a happy childhood.

The idea of children's agency is central to the growing field of childhood studies. In this book David Oswell argues for new understandings of children's agency. He traces the transformation of children and childhood across the nineteenth, twentieth and early twenty-first centuries and explores the dramatic changes in recent years to children's everyday lives as a consequence of new networked, mobile technologies and new forms of globalisation. The author reviews existing theories of children's agency as well as providing the theoretical tools for thinking of children's agency as spatially, temporally and materially complex. With this in mind, he surveys the main issues in childhood studies, with chapters covering family, schooling, crime, health, consumer culture, work and human rights. This is a comprehensive text intended for students and academic researchers across the humanities and social sciences interested in the study of children and childhood.

Building on recent human rights scholarship, childhood studies and child rights programming, this conceptual framework on children's rights proposes three key-notions: living rights, or the lived experiences in which rights take shape; social justice, or the shared normative beliefs that make rights appear legitimate for those who struggle to get them recognised; and translations, or the complex flux between different beliefs and perspectives on rights and their codification. By exploring the relationships between these three concepts, the realities and complexities of children's rights are highlighted. The framework is critical of approaches to children as passive targets of good intentions and aims to disclose how children craft their own conceptions and practices of rights. The contributions offer important insights into new ways of thinking and research within this emerging field.

This timely and thought-provoking book explores children's lives in contemporary cities. At a time of intense debate about the quality of life in cities, this book examines how they can become good places for children to live in. Through contributions from childhood experts in Europe, Australia and America, the book shows the importance of studying children's lives in cities in a comparative and generational perspective. It also contains fascinating accounts of city living from children themselves, and offers practical design solutions.
The authors consider the importance of the city as a social, material and cultural place for children, and explore the connections and boundaries between home, neighbourhood, community and city. Throughout, they stress the importance of engaging with how children see their city in order to reform it within a child-sensitive framework.
This book is invaluable reading for students and academics in the field of anthropology, sociology, social policy and education. It will also be of interest to those working in the field of architecture, urban planning and design.

Every child knows what it means to play, but the rest of us can merely speculate. Is it a kind of adaptation, teaching us skills, inducting us into certain communities? Is it power, pursued in games of prowess? Fate, deployed in games of chance? Daydreaming, enacted in art? Or is it just frivolity? Brian Sutton-Smith, a leading proponent of play theory, considers each possibility as it has been proposed, elaborated, and debated in disciplines from biology, psychology, and education to metaphysics, mathematics, and sociology.

Sutton-Smith focuses on play theories rooted in seven distinct "rhetorics"--the ancient discourses of Fate, Power, Communal Identity, and Frivolity and the modern discourses of Progress, the Imaginary, and the Self. In a sweeping analysis that moves from the question of play in child development to the implications of play for the Western work ethic, he explores the values, historical sources, and interests that have dictated the terms and forms of play put forth in each discourse's "objective" theory.

This work reveals more distinctions and disjunctions than affinities, with one striking exception: however different their descriptions and interpretations of play, each rhetoric reveals a quirkiness, redundancy, and flexibility. In light of this, Sutton-Smith suggests that play might provide a model of the variability that allows for "natural" selection. As a form of mental feedback, play might nullify the rigidity that sets in after successful adaption, thus reinforcing animal and human variability. Further, he shows how these discourses, despite their differences, might offer the components for a new social science of play.

You're twelve years old. Your mother's a junkie and your father might as well be dead. You can't read or write, and you don't go to school. An average day means sitting round a bonfire with your mates smoking drugs, or stealing cars. Welcome to Urban's world. Bernard Hare was on society's margins, living on one of Leeds' roughest estates and with a liking for drink and drugs. So he knew what life in the underclass was like in '90s Britain. But even he was shocked when he met Urban, an illiterate, glue-sniffing twelve-year-old. And through Urban he got to know the Shed Crew - an anarchic gang of kids between the ages of ten and fourteen; joy-riding, thieving runaways, who were no strangers to drugs or sex. Nearly all had been in care, but few adults really cared. Bernard decided to do what he could. He didn't know what he was letting himself in for.

Adorable ocean creatures sway, jiggle and play, glide, flip, and dive in this beautiful board book featuring lyrics from Caspar Babypants and collage art from artist Kate Endle. Toddlers will love this colorful board book about ocean creatures, featuring beautiful and playful collage art by indie artist Kate Endle and the clever word play of Seattle songwriter Caspar Babypants.

In Centuries of Childhood, the French historian Philippe Aries offers a fundamentally fresh interpretation of what childhood is and what the institution means for society at large. Aries's core idea is that ‘childhood,’ as we understand it today – a special time that requires special efforts and resources – is an invention of the 19th century, and that before that date children were in effect thought of as small adults. This led him to a re-evaluation of sources that suggested a second, crucial, conclusion: the idea that these competing visions of childhood were the products of two very different conceptions of human society.

An earlier, essentially communal, social ideal, Aries wrote, had been supplanted by a society far more family-centric and hence inward-facing. In his view, moreover, this increased focus on childhood posed a direct challenge to a well-entrenched social order. ‘One is tempted to conclude,’ he wrote, ‘that sociability and the concept of the family were incompatible, and could develop only at each other's expense.’

This revolutionary thesis, which has inspired and infuriated other historians in roughly equal measure, was made possible by Aries's determination to understand the meaning of the evidence available to him and highlight problems of definition that others had simply glossed over, making Centuries of Childhood an important example of the critical thinking skill of interpretation.

Children's Geographies is an overview of a rapidly expanding area of cutting edge research. Drawing on original research and extensive case studies in Europe, North and South America, Africa and Asia, the book analyses children's experiences of playing, living and learning.
The diverse case studies range from an historical analysis of gender relationss in nineteenth century North American playgrounds through to children's experiences of after school care in contemporary Britain, to street cultures amongst homeless children in Indonesia at the end of the twentieth century. Threaded through this empirical diversity, is a common engagement with current debates about the nature of childhood.
The individual chapters draw on contemporary sociological understandings of children's competence as social actors. In so doing they not only illustrate the importance of such an approach to our understandings of children's geographies, they also contribute to current debates about spatiality in the social studies of childhood.

Urban living has dramatically changed over the past generation, refashioning children's relationships with the towns and cities in which they live, and the modes of living within them. Focusing on the global shift in urban planning towards sustainable urbanism - from master planned 'sustainable communities', to the green retrofitting of existing urban environments - Children Living in Sustainable Built Environments offers a critical analysis of the challenges, tensions and opportunities for children and young people living in these environments. Drawing upon original data, Children Living in Sustainable Built Environments demonstrates how the needs, interests and participation of children and young people often remain inferior to the design, planning and local politics of new urban communities. Considering children from their crucial role as residents engaging and contributing to the vitalities of their community, to their role as consumers using and understanding sustainable design features, the book critically discusses the prospects of future inclusion of children and young people as a social group in sustainable urbanism. Truly interdisciplinary, Children Living in Sustainable Built Environments forms an original theoretical and empirical contribution to the understanding of the everyday lives of children and young people and will appeal to academics and students in the fields of education, childhood studies, sociology, anthropology, human geography and urban studies, as well as policy-makers, architects, urban planners and other professionals working on sustainable urban designs.

Children in the Marshall Islands do many things that adults do not. They walk around half naked. They carry and eat food in public without offering it to others. They talk about things they see rather than hiding uncomfortable truths. They explicitly refuse to give. Why do they do these things? Many think these behaviors are a natural result of children's innate immaturity. But Elise Berman argues that children are actually taught to do things that adults avoid: to be rude, inappropriate, and immature. Before children learn to be adults, they learn to be different from them. Berman's main theoretical claim therefore is also a novel one: age emerges through interaction and is a social production. In Talking Like Children, Berman analyzes a variety of interactions in the Marshall Islands, all broadly based around exchange: adoption negotiations, efforts to ask for or avoid giving away food, contentious debates about supposed child abuse. In these dramas both large and small, age differences emerge through the decisions people make, the emotions they feel, and the power they gain. Berman's research includes a range of methods - participant observation, video and audio recordings, interviews, children's drawings - that yield a significant corpus of data including over 80 hours of recorded naturalistic social interaction. Presented as a series of captivating stories, Talking Like Children is an intimate analysis of speech and interaction that shows what age means. Like gender and race, age differences are both culturally produced and socially important. The differences between Marshallese children and adults give both groups the ability to manipulate social life in distinct but often complementary ways. These differences produce culture itself. Talking Like Children establishes age as a foundational social variable and a central concern of anthropological and linguistic research.

During the 1990s lone mothers reached the top of the political agenda, viewed as both a drain on public expenditure and a moral threat. What has been missing from the debate is an understanding of how we have got to where we are. This study, by three leading experts in the field, sets out first to investigate the demographics of lone motherhood - how the pathways into lone motherhood have changed, and whether the changes of the last quarter of a century are as dramatic as they appear. Second, it looks at the wider context for the changes in lone motherhood in terms of ideas about marriage, and the changes in the construction of the never-married mother, from victim in the 1950s to parasite in the late 1980s. Finally, it examines the way in which policies have defined the problem of lone motherhood over time and the way in which lone mothers have been treated with regard to housing, social security, and employment. The study concludes that there is little possiblility of putting the genie back in the bottle in terms of reducing the number of lone mothers - efforts to do so by reducing public expenditure on them may be effective, but at the expense of the children involved. Instead,

The Importance of Being Innocent addresses the current debate in Australia and internationally regarding the sexualisation of children, predation on them by pedophiles and the risks apparently posed to their 'innate innocence' by perceived problems and threats in contemporary society. Joanne Faulkner argues that, contrary to popular opinion, social issues have been sensationally expounded in moral panics about children who are often presented as alternatively obese, binge-drinking and drug-using, self-harming, neglected, abused, medicated and driven to anti-social behavior by TV and computers. This erudite and thought-provoking book instead suggests that modern western society has reacted to problems plaguing the adult world by fetishizing children as innocents, who must be protected from social realities. Taking a philosophical and sociological perspective, it outlines the various historical trends, emotional investments and social tensions that shape contemporary ideas about what childhood represents, and our responsibilities in regard to children.

Are children of equal, lesser, or perhaps even greater moral importance than adults? This work of applied moral philosophy develops a comprehensive account of how adults as moral agents ascribe moral status to beings - ourselves and others - and on the basis of that account identifies multiple criteria for having moral status. It argues that proper application of those criteria should lead us to treat children as of greater moral importance than adults. This conclusion presents a basis for critiquing existing social practices, many of which implicitly presuppose that children occupy an inferior status, and for suggesting how government policy, law, and social life might be different if it reflected an assumption that children are actually of superior status.

During middle childhood, the period between ages 5 and 12, children gain the basic tools, skills and motivations to become productive members of their society. Failure to acquire these basic tools can lead to long-term consequences for children's future education, work and family life. In this book, first published in 2006, the editors assemble contributions from fifteen longitudinal studies representing diverse groups in the United States, Canada, New Zealand and the United Kingdom to learn what developmental patterns and experiences in middle childhood contexts forecast the directions children take when they reach adolescence and adulthood. The editors conclude that, although lasting individual differences are evident by the end of the preschool years, a child's developmental path in middle childhood contributes significantly to the adolescent and adult that he or she becomes. Families, peers and the broader social and economic environment all make a difference for young people's future education, work and relationships with others.

This is a unique account of working-class childhood during the British industrial revolution, first published in 2010. Using more than 600 autobiographies written by working men of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Jane Humphries illuminates working-class childhood in contexts untouched by conventional sources and facilitates estimates of age at starting work, social mobility, the extent of apprenticeship and the duration of schooling. The classic era of industrialisation, 1790-1850, apparently saw an upsurge in child labour. While the memoirs implicate mechanisation and the division of labour in this increase, they also show that fatherlessness and large subsets, common in these turbulent, high-mortality and high-fertility times, often cast children as partners and supports for mothers struggling to hold families together. The book offers unprecedented insights into child labour, family life, careers and schooling. Its images of suffering, stoicism and occasional childish pleasures put the humanity back into economic history and the trauma back into the industrial revolution.

Class does make a difference in the lives and futures of American children. Drawing on in-depth observations of black and white middle-class, working-class, and poor families, Unequal Childhoods explores this fact, offering a picture of childhood today. Here are the frenetic families managing their children's hectic schedules of "leisure" activities; and here are families with plenty of time but little economic security. Lareau shows how middle-class parents, whether black or white, engage in a process of "concerted cultivation" designed to draw out children's talents and skills, while working-class and poor families rely on "the accomplishment of natural growth," in which a child's development unfolds spontaneously--as long as basic comfort, food, and shelter are provided. Each of these approaches to childrearing brings its own benefits and its own drawbacks. In identifying and analyzing differences between the two, Lareau demonstrates the power, and limits, of social class in shaping the lives of America's children.
The first edition of "Unequal Childhoods" was an instant classic, portraying in riveting detail the unexpected ways in which social class influences parenting in white and African American families. A decade later, Annette Lareau has revisited the same families and interviewed the original subjects to examine the impact of social class in the transition to adulthood.

Discover an all-in-one encyclopedia that takes you on an explanatory tour of the world from your own body to outer space. Have you ever wondered how an email gets to someone on the other side of the world in just a few seconds or why it's a bad idea to stand under a tree during a thunderstorm? Discover the answers to all these questions and more with this mind-boggling how things work books for children! Each page of this mind-blowingly detailed and ambitious encyclopedia will guide you through the natural world and the technology that surrounds you. Giant, page-filling illustrations take objects apart - or take the roofs and walls off buildings - to show you how they work, explaining both basic principles, such as photosynthesis, as well as broader concepts, like how all the living things in a rainforest interact. Explore each and every page of this engaging how things work book to discover: - Key insights into both the natural and human worlds - Striking photography that brings certain concepts to life - A diverse range of chapters coinciding with STEM subjects at school In this how things work encyclopedia, topics range from the human body, to planet Earth, sleep patterns to cooking, sewage systems, wind farms, fungi spores, plate tectonics and more! How Everything Works is perfect for children studying STEM subjects at school or anyone who is simply curious about how nature and the modern world work.