Children's Rights and Moral Parenting offers systematic treatment of a variety of issues involving the intersection of the rights of children and the moral responsibility of parents. Mark C. Vopat offers a theory of the relationship between children, parents, and the state that can be applied to the real life decisions that parents are often in the position to make on behalf of their children. In many instances, our current view of parental "rights" has granted parents far more discretion than is morally warranted. Vopat arrives at this conclusion by carefully considering the unique status children have; socially, legally, and morally in most western societies. Children's Rights and Moral Parenting is essentially contractualist in the Rawlsian tradition. While it may appear counterintuitive to speak of children in terms of the social contract tradition, there is much this approach can do to provide some conceptual clarity to the nature of the relationship between children, parents and the state. The overarching theme of the book is the moral independence of children from extreme forms of parental and, at times, social control. The objective of the book is to provide an argument for extending the range of things owed to children, as well as making the case for fully including children in the moral community.

This gripping book considers the history, techniques, and goals of child-targeted consumer campaigns and examines children's changing perceptions of what commodities they "need" to be valued and value themselves. In this critique of America's consumption-based society, author Jennifer Hill chronicles the impact of consumer culture on children-from the evolution of childhood play to a child's self-perception as a consumer to the consequences of this generation's repeated media exposure to violence. Hill proposes that corporations, eager to tap into a multibillion-dollar market, use the power of advertising and the media to mold children's thoughts and behaviors. The book features vignettes with teenagers explaining, in their own words, how advertising determines their needs, wants, and self-esteem. An in-depth analysis of this research reveals the influence of media on a young person's desire to conform, shows how broadcasted depictions of beauty distort the identities of children and teens, and uncovers corporate agendas for manipulating behavior in the younger generation. The work concludes with the position that corporations are shaping children to be efficient consumers but, in return, are harming their developing young minds and physical well-being. Features content from across disciplines including sociology, psychology, cultural anthropology, and social work Introduces the idea that corporations exert a powerful-and largely negative-influence over children and childhood Offers a theoretical explanation of the current state of consumer capitalism Presents findings based on original research conducted by the author

What was lost when Kids Company imploded last summer? More than reputations. The charitys founding vision, that there is a gap called love in how the state responds to abused and abandoned children, also vanished. In this book, the founder of Kids Company lays out the thinking behind a model of care that broke the cycle of neglect for thousands of vulnerable children. She reveals the true scale of Britain's failure in children's services, making public two decades of candid exchanges with prime ministers and senior politicians to explain why the sector has not improved since Victorian times. She also reveals the deceits used by local authorities to stop the magnitude of the problem becoming known. This is a book of hope, however. Calling on a plethora of moving case histories, it presents the science that gives cause for optimism; proof that even the most troubled young lives can be turned around. Looking forward rather than back, the book shows how a new model of support could be cheaper and far more effective than existing provision. Kids Company has gone. And yet something like it must be the future.It is imperative that the breakthroughs in understanding that came from its work are now shared with the widest audience. This book is an unusual collaboration between two outstanding individuals. One author is Camila Batmanghelidjh, who spent thirty years working with troubled families. The other is an award-winning journalist, Tim Rayment, who was sent to investigate Camila but decided instead that the real public interest lay in hearing her vital, life-changing message.

The lives and futures of children and animals are linked to environmental challenges associated with the Anthropocene and the acceleration of human-caused extinctions. This book sparks a fascinating interdisciplinary conversation about child-animal relations, calling for a radical shift in how we understand our relationship with other animals and our place in the world. It addresses issues of interspecies and intergenerational environmental justice through examining the entanglement of children's and animal's lives and common worlds. It explores everyday encounters and unfolding relations between children and urban wildlife. Inspired by feminist environmental philosophies and indigenous cosmologies, the book poses a new relational ethics based upon the small achievements of child-animal interactions. It also provides an analysis of animal narratives in children's popular culture. It traces the geo-historical trajectories and convergences of these narratives and of the lives of children and animals in settler-colonised lands. This innovative book brings together the fields of more-than-human geography, childhood studies, multispecies studies, and the environmental humanities. It will be of interest to students and scholars who are reconsidering the ethics of child-animal relations from a fresh perspective.

This book presents a range of innovative analytical frameworks that can be used to approach the complexities of children's understandings and experiences of well-being in a locally oriented, context-sensitive and multi-nationally comparative way. It addresses the challenges of undertaking research on children's understandings of well-being from a multi-national qualitative perspective. Chapters in the book present results that show how children from various places all over the world conceptualize and experience well-being as well as how this is linked local, regional and national social, political and cultural contexts.

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.

This book offers a compelling look at the use of childhood as metaphor in early America. Nothing tugs on American heartstrings more than an image of a suffering child. Anna Mae Duane goes back to the nation's violent beginnings to examine how the ideal of childhood in early America was fundamental to forging concepts of ethnicity, race, and gender. Duane argues that children had long been used to symbolize subservience, but in the New World those old associations took on more meaning. Drawing on a wide range of early American writing, she explores how the figure of a suffering child accrued political weight as the work of infantilization connected the child to Native Americans, slaves, and women. In the making of the young nation, the figure of the child emerged as a vital conceptual tool for coming to terms with the effects of cultural and colonial violence, and with time childhood became freighted with associations of vulnerability, suffering, and victimhood that shaped the perception of childhood itself: as a site of vulnerability, suffering, and victimhood. As Duane looks at how ideas about the child and childhood were manipulated by the colonizers and the colonized alike, she reveals a powerful line of colonizing logic in which dependence and vulnerability are assigned great emotional weight. When early Americans sought to make sense of intercultural contact - and the conflict that often resulted - they used the figure of the child to help displace their own fear of lost control and shifting power.

The sexualization of girls has captured the attention of the media, advocacy groups and politicians in recent years. This prolific discourse sets alarm bells ringing: sexualization is said to lead to depression, promiscuity and compassion deficit disorder, and rob young girls of their childhood. However, measuring such claims against a wide range of data sources reveals a far more complicated picture.

"Becoming Sexual" begins with a simple question: why does this discourse feel so natural? Analyzing potent cultural and historical assumptions, and subjecting them to measured investigation, R. Danielle Egan illuminates the implications of dominant thinking on sexualization. The sexualized girl functions as a metaphor for cultural decay and as a common enemy through which adult rage, discontent and anxiety regarding class, gender, sexuality, race and the future can be expressed. Egan argues that, ultimately, the popular literature on sexualization is more reflective of adult disquiet than it is about the lives and practices of girls.

"Becoming Sexual" will be a welcome intervention into these fraught polemics for anyone interested in engaging with a high-profile contemporary debate, and will be particularly useful for students of sociology, cultural studies, childhood studies, gender studies and media studies.

The focus of this book is the journey babies have made over the past century. The rise of the middle class in America dictated major changes in the ways babies were fed, cared for, and raised. Social programs focused on improving water and sanitation programs for all, which led directly to decreased infection among infants and improved morbidity and mortality rates. Other programs also focused attention on babies. Advances in medicine allowed infants to be immunized against once-deadly and disabling diseases and to survive congenital defects, premature birth, and infectious disease. Physicians helped infertile couples conceive and carry a baby to term. Prenatal care helped mothers give birth to a healthy baby. Early intervention services gave infants an advantage as they faced growing up in the modern era. Today, most American babies are better off than they were in 1901. Overall they are bigger, healthier, and much more likely to survive the first year. But challenges remain. By reviewing the events of the past century, Reedy hopes we can make even more of a difference in the lives of American babies in the century to come. In 1900, most babies were born at home. Infant mortality was high and most families could expect to lose one or more of their babies within the first year of life. A family was expected to have babies, and they were certainly wanted in most situations, however, they did not generally receive the attention they do today. In the early years of the 21st century, the birth of a baby is a time of joy for most parents and extended families. Birth occurs most often in a hospital delivery room with the father and sometimes other family members present. While the infant mortality rate in the United States still lags behind many other developed countries, it has significantly improved over the past century, and infant death is not a family expectation. The main focus of this book is the journey babies have made over the past century. The rise of the middle class in America dictated major changes in the ways babies were fed, cared for, and raised. No longer a financial necessity as in an agrarian society, babies became a symbol of middle class prosperity and parents basked in the reflected glow. Social programs, authorized and regulated by federal and state government, became a reality. Progressive Era reformers focused on improving water and sanitation programs for all, which led directly to decreased infection among infants and improved the dismal morbidity and mortality rates prevalent among all social classes. Other programs, such as the Shepard-Towner Act, the Social Security Act, and Lyndon Johnson's Great Society initiatives also focused attention on babies. Advances in medicine allowed infants to be immunized against once-deadly and disabling diseases and to survive congenital defects, premature birth, and infectious disease. Physicians discovered the means to help infertile couples conceive and carry a baby to term. Prenatal care helped mothers prepare for the birth of a healthy baby. Early intervention services by educators, social workers, and others gave infants an advantage as they faced growing up in the modern era. At the beginning of the 21st century, most American babies are better off than they were in 1901. Overall they are bigger, healthier, and much more likely to survive the first year. But challenges remain. By reviewing the events of the past century, Reedy hopes we can make even more of a difference in the lives of American babies in the century to come.

This title looks at challenging prejudices about the women and children who beg in Ecuadorian cities. In 1992, Calhuasi, an isolated Andean town, got its first road. Newly connected to Ecuador's large cities, Calhuasi experienced rapid social-spatial change, which Kate Swanson richly describes in ""Begging as a Path to Progress"". Based on nineteen months of fieldwork, Swanson's study pays particular attention to the ideas and practices surrounding youth. While begging seems to be inconsistent with - or even an affront to - ideas about childhood in the developed world, Swanson demonstrates that the majority of income earned from begging goes toward funding Ecuadorian children's educations in hopes of securing more prosperous futures. Examining beggars' organized migration networks, as well as the degree to which children can express agency and fulfill personal ambitions through begging, Swanson argues that Calhuasi's beggars are capable of canny engagement with the forces of change. She also shows how frequent movement between rural and urban Ecuador has altered both, masculinizing the countryside and complicating the Ecuadorian conflation of whiteness and cities. Finally, her study unpacks ongoing conflicts over programs to 'clean up' Quito and other major cities, noting that revanchist efforts have had multiple effects - spurring more dangerous transnational migration, for example, while also providing some women and children with tourist-friendly local spaces in which to sell a notion of Andean authenticity.

The stories of four among hundreds of runaway youths treated in Slesnick's program illustrate points in this volume, which offers a summary of the information known about runaway and homeless children and teenagers. In addition to describing the breadth of this problem, this book explains different types of runaway and homeless youths, and why they leave home by choice or are asked to leave. Slesnick also explains some of the factors common to these children and their families, as well as what happens to the youths when they leave home. Direction and support are provided for parents from this clinical psychologist, who notes that there are few resources and programs across the nation designed specifically to help families with runaway youths. Told by a parent and three runaways themselves, the stories of four people trying to understand the causes and cope with the afte- effects of running away serve to illustrate research results and issues presented here. This work will be of interest not only to parents of runaways and to mental health professionals, but also to students of adolescent psychology, family psychology, and clinical child psychology.

This book presents for the first time in English language an overview of the research done in Brazil in the field of studies of children's play. The volume brings together contributions from researchers of the Working Group Toy, Education and Health, of the Brazilian National Association of Research and Graduate Studies in Psychology (ANPEPP), including empirical studies and literature reviews about indigenous children, riverside communities, urban children in situation of social vulnerability, projects of early childhood education and the ludic possibilities of digital technologies. It aims to show the cultural diversity of Brazil expressed in its children's play, providing valuable resources for international researchers of play interested in intercultural studies.

An avalanche of recent newspapers, weekly newsmagazines, scholarly journals, and academic books has helped to spark a heated debate by publishing warnings of a "boy crisis" in which male students at all academic levels have begun falling behind their female peers. In Learning the Hard Way, Edward W. Morris explores and analyzes detailed ethnographic data on this purported gender gap between boys and girls in educational achievement at two low-income high schools-one rural and predominantly white, the other urban and mostly African American. Crucial questions arose from his study of gender at these two schools. Why did boys tend to show less interest in and more defiance toward school? Why did girls significantly outperform boys at both schools? Why did people at the schools still describe boys as especially "smart"? Morris examines these questions and, in the process, illuminates connections of gender to race, class, and place. This book is not simply about the educational troubles of boys, but the troubled and complex experience of gender in school. It reveals how particular race, class, and geographical experiences shape masculinity and femininity in ways that affect academic performance. His findings add a new perspective to the "gender gap" in achievement.