Raising Germans in the Age of Empire is a cultural history of the German colonial imagination around the turn of the twentieth century. Looking beyond the colonialist movement, it focuses on young Germans who grew up during this era and the various commercial and educational media through which they daily encountered the wider world. Using their imaginary colonial encounters, Jeff Bowersox explores how Germans young and old came to terms with a globalizing world. Chapters on toys, school instruction, popular literature, and the Boy Scouts (or Pfadfinder) reveal how Germans, through mass consumer culture and mass education, built a definitive association between colonial hierarchies and Germany's place in the modern age. By 1914 this colonial sensibility had been accepted as common sense, but it always remained flexible and vague. It could be adapted to serve competing and contradictory purposes, ranging from profit and pedagogical reform to nationalist mobilization and international socialist solidarity. Thus, as young Germans used images of imperialism to construct their own fantastical adventures, adults tried to use those same images to ward off the worst excesses of industrial modernity and to mold young people into capable and productive citizens. The result was a chaotic multitude of imagined empires vying for space in the public arena as Germans debated how best to raise the next generation of children. Raising Germans in the Age of Empire explains how colonial visions not only shaped Germans' engagement with globalization but also determined how they understood themselves as a modern nation.

This volume explores how children's rights has influenced research with children and how research can in turn shape policies and practices to enhance children's rights. The book examines the impact children's rights and Childhood Studies has had on how children are constructed and regulated internationally.

How do young people see the future? Are they optimistic or pessimistic? Do their views vary from culture to culture? Are young people actively engaged in creating their desired futures or are they passively receiving the future? What effect has globalization on youth culture? How is the future taught in schools? These and many other questions are dealt with in this volume of comparative empirical research from around the world on how youth see the future.

Generally, youth are considered immature, irresponsible toward the future, cliquish, impressionistic, and dangerous toward self and others. They are considered as a mass market--two billion strong--the passive recipients of globalization. Most recently in OECD nations, youth have become fodder for political speeches--they are the problem that reflects both the failure of the welfare state (dependence on the state), the failure of globalization (unemployment), and postmodernism (loss of meaning and the crisis of the spirit). In the Third World, youth are seen not only as the problem, but equally as the force that can topple a regime (as in Yugoslavia). However, youth can also be seen as carriers of a new worldview, a new ideology.

These and other views concerning youth are examined in this volume of comparative empirical research. Studies from around the world provide intriguing answers to questions about how youth see the future and their future roles. This book will be of particular interest to scholars, students, researchers, and policymakers involved with youth issues and future studies.

Drawing on extensive research with a diverse group of seventy teen girls, Zaslow offers a critical account of the girl power moment in which feminism and femininity are shrink-wrapped together in one market-friendly package. With a focus on pop music and television, she skillfully explores the negotiative processes of teen girls as they make sense of girl power's new cultural narratives of femininity as well as its failure to offer strategies for real social change. Written in highly accessible language, this book charts new territory as it offers a rich account of the ways in which teen girls understand style, sexuality, motherhood, and feminism in girl power media culture, and how their desires, social experiences, and imaginings of the future are shaped in their relationship with a neoliberal girl power discourse.

Whether members of the family are headed to school or work, smartphones accompany family members throughout the day. The growing sophistication of mobile communication has unleashed a proliferation of apps, channels, and platforms that link parents to their children and the key institutions in their lives. While parents may feel empowered by their ability to provide their children assistance with a click on their smartphone, they may also feel pressured and overwhelmed by this need to always be on call for their children. This book focuses on the phenomenon of transcendent parenting, where parents actively use technology to go beyond traditional, physical practices of parenting. In drawing on the experiences of intensely digitally-connected families in Singapore to tell a global story, Sun Sun Lim argues how transcendent parenting can embody and convey, intentionally or not, the parenting priorities in these households. Chapters outline how parents exploit mobile connectivity to transcend the physical distance between themselves and their children, the online and offline social interaction environments, and the timelessness of seemingly ceaseless parenting. Transcendent Parenting further explores how mobile communication allows parents to be more involved than ever in their children's lives, leaving readers to question whether or not parents have become too involved as a result. With its clear discussions of the effects of transcendent parenting on parents' wellbeing and children's personal development, Transcendent Parenting will appeal to a broad audience of readers, from scholars, educators and policy makers to parents and young people across the globe.

The theme of this volume, studies in macro-micro influences on children, in their pathways to adulthood is aimed at examining the points of intersect between individual and family level reactions to the socioeconomic forces buffeting all industrialised societies. The papers in this volume allow understanding of the larger context which children acquire their experience and capacities for growth.

Updated to incorporate recent scholarship on the subject, this new edition of Hugh Cunningham's classic text investigates the relationship between ideas about childhood and the actual experience of being a child, and assesses how it has changed over the span of 500 years. Through his engaging narrative Hugh Cunningham tells the story of the development of ideas from the Renaissance to the present, revealing considerable differences in the way Western societies have understood and valued childhood over time. His survey of parent/child relationships uncovers evidence of parental love, care and, in the frequent cases of child death, grief throughout the period, concluding that there was as much continuity as change in the actual relations of children and adults across these five centuries. Since the book's first publication in 1995, the volume of historical research on children and childhood has escalated hugely and is testimony to the level of concern provoked by the dominance of the negative narrative that originated in the 1970s and 1980s. A new epilogue revisits the volume from today's perspective, analysing why this negative narrative established dominance in Western society and considering how it has affected historical writing about children and childhood, enabling the reader to put both this volume and recent debates into context. Supported by an updated historiographical discussion and expanded bibliography, Children and Childhood in Western Society since 1500 remains an essential resource for students of the history of childhood, the history of the family, social history and gender history.

First Published in 1981. This book presents a detailed account of a two-year study relating preschool children's home television-viewing patterns to their spontaneous behavior, play, aggression, and language use in nursery school settings. It also describes an attempt to modify children's viewing patterns and behavior through interventions with parents and special training procedures. This book will be of special interest to behavioral scientists and graduate students in the fields of child development and communication research.

Beginning from a poststructuralist position, "Constructing the Child Viewer" examines three decades of U.S. research on television and children. The book concludes that historical concepts of the child television viewer are products of discourse and cannot be taken to reflect objective, scientific truths about the child viewer. Widely disseminated constructs of the passive viewer, the active viewer, the interactive viewer, and the media literate viewer are seen as problematic. Nearly all academic studies published from 1948 to 1979 on the subject are included in this volume. Each receives close textual analysis, making this a useful bibliographic resource and reference book. Methodologically and theoretically, this is the first text of its kind to read the history of research on television and children as an archaeology of knowledge.

"Constructing the Child Viewer" is an extensive bibliographical resource, a preliminary introduction to Foucault's discourse theory, and an experimental application of that theory to one major strand of the discourse of mass communications research. Students of educational psychology, sociology, and communications/media will find this work invaluable.

Marketing targeted at kids is virtually everywhere -- in classrooms and textbooks, on the Internet, even at Girl Scout meetings, slumber parties, and the playground. Product placement and other innovations have introduced more subtle advertising to movies and television. Drawing on her own survey research and unprecedented access to the advertising industry, Juliet B. Schor, "New York Times" bestselling author of "The Overworked American, " examines how marketing efforts of vast size, scope, and effectiveness have created "commercialized children." Ads and their messages about sex, drugs, and food affect not just what children want to buy, but who they think they are. In this groundbreaking and crucial book, Schor looks at the consequences of the commercialization of childhood and provides guidelines for parents and teachers. What is at stake is the emotional and social well-being of our children.
Like Barbara Ehrenreich's "Nickel and Dimed, " Mary Pipher's "Reviving Ophelia, " and Malcolm Gladwell's "The Tipping Point, Born to Buy" is a major contribution to our understanding of a contemporary trend and its effects on the culture.

As a global problem, human trafficking frequently victimizes the most vulnerable: children. Offenders often use the Internet as a vehicle for criminal activities, including acts to sexually exploit children. With Internet access growing exponentially, more children are online every day, increasing their risk of becoming involved in sexual exploitation or being treated as a commodity. Inconsistent law among States and their lack of cooperation across borders makes combatting this issue increasingly difficult. Therefore, it is crucial to establish legal and policy frameworks that can be used to fight practices of online child sexual exploitation and increase the effectiveness of States' responses. This book offers alternative solutions using a human rights approach and promotes multi-stakeholder collaboration in the context of corporate social responsibility to prevent and combat these offenses. This book explores the intersection of children's human rights, cybersex trafficking, and international legislation. It provides helpful insights for lawmakers, legal practitioners, scholars, law enforcement officers, child advocates, and students interested in human rights law, criminal law, and child protection.

This book examines how pathologising ideas of failing, chaotic and dysfunctional families create a powerful consensus that Britain is in the grip of a `parent crisis' and are used to justify increasingly punitive state policies.

"Guaranteed free of unicorns and princesses, it's fun, empowering fiction for 5-8 year olds." David Nicholls, author of One Day "Every young girl should read this series!" Amanda Holden "I loved learning about how the ocean is in trouble." Tess, age 6 Join best friends Katy, Cassie and Zia on a series of amazing adventures as they work together to save the planet... On the hottest day of the year, the friends imagine a water slide coming out of Katy's bedroom window. As they plunge into an underwater world, they can't wait to explore. But when they meet a dolphin in distress, they realise the ocean is in big trouble. It's so full of plastic that the sea creatures have been forced to flee their homes. Can the friends come up with a plan to put things right?

This work provides a detailed history of infanticide in mainland Britain from 1600 to the modern era for the very first time. It examines continuity and change in the nature and characteristics of new-born child murder in Scotland, England and Wales over a chronology of more than four centuries. Alongside offering a comparative analysis of the types of individuals suspected of the offence, and a detailed appreciation of the different ways in which the crime was carried out, the work also exposes the broad nexus of causal factors which underpinned its enactment. In addition, the work investigates the evolving attitude in social, medical and legal contexts to the killing of young infants in Britain over a substantive time period. Thus the work as a whole is both compelling and innovative as it provides the reader with much more than a mere history of infanticide. The book also contributes much to our understanding of criminal history, gender history, legal history, medical history and social history in its analyses of the different contexts allied to the offence. It does this also through its exploration of the complex characteristics of accusers, commentators and perpetrators across cultures, borders and time.

Key Thinkers in Childhood Studies presents the contrasting perspectives of some of the leading figures involved in shaping the field of Childhood Studies over the last 30 years. Using in-depth interviews, twenty-two high profile pioneers, who represent a range of disciplines and nationalities, share personal and unpublished accounts of their work and careers. They reflect upon the significant changes that have taken place in the study of children and childhood, discuss the evolution of ideas underpinning the field, examine current tensions and dilemmas and explore challenges for the future. This book fills a gap by offering important insights into researchers' experiences in Childhood Studies and their ideas about the central issues confronting the field. It will be of interest to students, practitioners and experienced academics from all disciplinary backgrounds who are seeking to contextualise, understand and advance our understanding of childhood, children and youth.

Growing up in Latin America contributes to the growing body of scholarship on the representation of children and minors in contemporary Latin American literature and film. This volume looks closely at the question of agency and the role of minors as active participants in the complex historical processes of the Latin American continent during the 20th and 21st centuries, both as national citizens and as transnational migrants. Questions of gender, migration, violence, post-coloniality, and precarity are central to the analysis of childhood and youth narratives in this collection of essays.

This book locates internally focused, critical perspectives regarding the social, political, emotional, and mental growth of children. Through the radical openness afforded by psychoanalytic and related frameworks, the goal of this volume is to illuminate, promote, and help situate subjectivities that are often blotted out for both the child and society. Developmental and linear assumptions and hegemonies are called into question. Chapters address the challenges involved in working with children who have experienced traumas of dis-location that do not fit neatly into normative theories of development The emphasis is on motifs of lostness and foundness, in terms of the geographies of the psycho-social, and how such motifs govern and regulate what have come to count as the normative indexes of childhood as well as how they exclude other real childhoods. What is 'lost' in childhood finds its way into narratives of loss in adult functioning and these narratives are of interest since they allow us to re-theorize ideas of child, family, and society. To that end, these essays focus in and on dissociated places and moments across varied childhood(s).

Informed by ethnographic research with children, Davies offers new sociological insights into children's personal relationships, as well as closely examining methodological approaches to researching with children and researching relationships.

Governance and Crisis of the State in Africa explores the problems and challenges of disruptive conflicts and conflict management in West Africa. Based on a robust analysis of a large stock of theoretical and empirical studies on the nature of the state in Africa and the incidents of state failure, fragmentation and collapse, the author argues that a major explanation of state weakness in Africa is the lack of the imperatives of good governance - itself rooted in the trajectory of the emergence of these states. Using the recent internal wars and ongoing conflicts in some West African states such as Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea, Guinea- Bissau and Cote d'Ivoire as case studies, the author explains how the use of inappropriate methods of conflict management exacerbates these conflicts and the crisis of the nation-state in Africa. ________________ John Emeka Akude holds a PhD in political science from the University of Cologne, Germany where he teaches African Politics, Politics of Development and International Political Economy. His research interests include political economy, the state and economic development, conflict studies, state collapse and war economies as well as the transformation of political order. His publications include "Krisen und Krisenmanagement in Afrika," Zwischen Wunschdenken und Ohnmacht: Der Anspruch der Afrikanischen Union auf Konfliktmanagement in Afrika," "Bad Governance and State Collapse in Africa" as well as "Weak States and Security Threats in West Africa." He is a member of the Working Group on the Transformation of Political Order at the Chair of International Relations, University of Cologne, Germany.

Elgar Advanced Introductions are stimulating and thoughtful introductions to major fields in the social sciences, business and law, expertly written by the world's leading scholars. Designed to be accessible yet rigorous, they offer concise and lucid surveys of the substantive and policy issues associated with discrete subject areas. This Advanced Introduction to Youth Studies analyses the historical development of the sociology of youth in the context of changing population demographics. Howard Williamson and James Cote explore competing paradigms underlying current understandings of youth with reference to key philosophical, theoretical and methodological debates. Young people's transitions to adulthood and youth cultural behaviour are then explored. The authors conclude with a consideration of youth policies and how, in the future, these may be better informed by sociological research. Key Features: Fact-based analysis of key debates Sociological perspectives informed by multidisciplinary analyses Concise coverage of complex topics Policy recommendations informed by years of experience in the field This Advanced Introduction will provide essential reading for scholars and researchers of sociology and sociological theory, as well as youth workers and students looking for an excellent introduction to youth studies.

The Civil War is a much plumbed area of scholarship, so much so that at times it seems there is no further work to be done in the field. However, the experience of children and youth during that tumultuous time remains a relatively unexplored facet of the conflict. Children and Youth during the Civil War Era seeks a deeper investigation into the historical record by and giving voice and context to their struggles and victories during this critical period in American history. Prominent historians and rising scholars explore issues important to both the Civil War era and to the history of children and youth, including the experience of orphans, drummer boys, and young soldiers on the front lines, and even the impact of the war on the games children played in this collection. Each essay places the history of children and youth in the context of the sectional conflict, while in turn shedding new light on the sectional conflict by viewing it through the lens of children and youth. A much needed, multi-faceted historical account, Children and Youth during the Civil War Era touches on some of the most important historiographical issues with which historians of children and youth and of the Civil War home front have grappled over the last few years.

An invisible, growing monster roams the streets, preying on millions of innocent victims in the United States and overseas. This monster is child slavery, and it is woven into the very fabric of our daily lives. Because it touches every aspect of our lives, however, it can be addressed and solved.

In "Facing the Monster," author Carol Hart Metzker calls attention to the plight of t he world's children who live a life of modern slaver y. She tells how an unexpected encounter with a n eleven-year-old girl led her into the dark world of human trafficking, forced sex trade, and child slavery. Metzker's quest to find hope, to help end slavery, and to aid survivors took her as far as children's shelters in remote villages in India and as close as a special home just miles from her front door in Pennsylvania.

"Facing the Monster" narrates the stories of rescued child slaves and paints a poignant picture of the plight of hidden victims worldwide. Metzker's inspiring chronicle reveals the monstrous truths about child slavery, provides an action plan to become an agent of change, and presents solutions to end it. It shows how one person's actions can change the lives of many and that everyone can take a step to fight child slavery.

Consideration of children in the academic field of Religious Studies is taking root, but Buddhist Studies has yet to take notice. This collection is intended to open the question of children in Buddhism. It brings together a wide range of scholarship and expertise to address the question of what role children have played in the literature, in particular historical contexts, and what role they continue to play in specific Buddhist contexts today. Because the material is, in most cases, uncharted, all nineteen contributors involved in the project have exchanged chapters among themselves and thereby engaged in a kind of internal cohesion difficult to achieve in an edited project. The volume is divided into two parts. Part One addresses the representation of children in Buddhist texts and Part Two looks at children and childhoods in Buddhist cultures around the world. Little Buddhas will be an indispensable resource for students and scholars of Buddhism and Childhood Studies, and a catalyst for further research on the topic.