Social capital, children and young people is about the relationships and networks - social capital - that children and young people have in and out of school.Social capital has become of increasing interest to policy makers but there has been little evidence of how it operates in practice. In this unique collection, the social capital of children and young people, and in one case parents and teachers, is explored in a wide range of formal and informal settings.The contributors to the book, who include academic researchers and educational professionals, provide in-depth accounts of social capital being developed and used by children and young people. They offer critical reflections on the significance of social capital and on the experiences of researching the social capital of sometimes vulnerable people.This book is essential reading for anyone concerned with how children and young people get along, get by and get on.

Using Film to Understand Childhood and Practice is an innovative and lively text which allows complex and challenging issues within childhood studies to be explored using the medium of filmed drama. By utilising popular culture, this book provides accessible narratives to students and lecturers needing to engage with complex theoretical ideas. In exposing theories to tangible situations often from more than one perspective in films, readers are helped to identify and recognise how theories about children and childhood can be applied. Each chapter uses a specific film to provide the basis for discussion in order to explore and analyse key concepts within childhood studies which include identity, social construction, families, political and biological narratives, children's rights and participation. A range of international films are used including Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Rabbit Proof Fence, The Hunger Games and The Red Balloon. First introducing the theoretical perspective to be discussed, chapters also include a contextual explanation of the film and list the specific scenes that will be used to guide students through. Concluding with discussion questions, students are asked to consider how the theories discussed might be translated in to their own experiences of children, childhood and practice. Not only supporting understanding of core principles and key ideas across any childhood studies degree, this book supports students throughout their university career and beyond by engaging with the journey of becoming a graduate as well as discussion of workplace issues and concepts after graduation.

This is the first book that examines Ghana's compliance with the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC). Ghana being the first country to ratify the Convention, it thus fills an important gap in the literature on Ghana. The book throws a searchlight on a wide range of rights issues including children's identity, violence against children and women, child exploitation and children in conflict with the law plus a host of other CRC related issues and further identifies and explains the main obstacles in the way of realizing children's rights in Ghana. A major strength of this book is that the contributors, Ghanaians and non-Ghanaians alike have vast experience in empirical research in Ghana and most importantly, come from diverse academic disciplines. Researchers, instructors, and students of Social Work, Sociology, Criminology Human Rights, Education and Law, are examples of a few academic disciplines that would find this book a welcome relief in their search for relevant and current data on children's issues in Ghana. It should also be of great interest to policy makers, human rights activists, Children's NGOs and international development partners interested in children's issues.

Children in poor countries are subjected to exploitation characterized by low wages and long hours of work, as well as by unclean, unhygienic and unsafe working and living conditions, and, more importantly, by deprivation from education, all of which hampers their physical and mental development. Child labour is a complex issue, and clearly it has no simple solution. This book sheds some understanding of its root causes. The book attempts to delve into many of the important theoretical aspects of child labour and suggests policies that could indeed be useful in dealing with the problem under diverse situations using alternative multisector general equilibrium models.

This collection explores mobile childhoods: from Latvia and Estonia to Finland; from Latvia to the United Kingdom; from Russia to Finland; and cyclical mobility by the Roma between Romania and Finland. The chapters examine how east-to-north European family mobility brings out different kinds of multilocal childhoods. The children experience unequal starting points and further twists throughout their childhood and within their family lives. Through the innovative use of ethnographic and participatory methods, the contributors demonstrate how diverse migrant children's everyday lives are, and how children themselves as well as their translocal families actively pursue better lives. The topics include naming and food practices, travel, schooling, summer holidays, economic and other inequalities, and the importance of age in understanding children's lives. Translocal Childhoods and Family Mobility in East and North Europe will be of interest to students and scholars across a range of disciplines, including sociology, anthropology and human geography.

Musical theater is a dynamic, collaborative art form, which encompasses music, theater, dance, and the visual arts. Traditionally associated with adult performers, musicals also have roles designated specifically for children. How then does involvement in musical theater support children's learning through the performing arts? What do children value from their musical theater experiences and how do these experiences influence children's personal, social, and artistic lives? Based on a decade of research, this book explores these questions through children's participation as singers, actors, and dancers, in school-based, community, and professional musical theater. By valuing children's voices as important in understanding experience, Rajan constructs a framework of musical theater participation, and applies broader educational implications to highlight the unique characteristics of musical theater in children's lives.

Drawing together international research from the fields of geography, alcohol studies, sociology, psychology and childhood studies, Jayne and Valentine explore children's understandings and experiences of alcohol consumption and the role of alcohol in family life. Chapters address both extra-familialnorms about parenting and drinking cultures which are generated in wider society (through law/regulation, media/advertising and social networks etc.) and intra-familialnorms including the modelling behaviour of family members attitudes to alcohol, drinking habits and practices, rules and guidance, and initiating children to drinking. Based on empirical research undertaken in the UK, and drawing on studies from around the world, Childhood, Family, Alcohol advances theoretical debates and offers insights relevant to policy and practice by: * adopting a cross-generational perspective on drinking cultures * exploring pre-teen children's understandings of alcohol * focusing on the significance of the spaces of everyday family life * considering adult alcohol consumption, drinking practices and drunken performativities * reflecting on social/individualized consumption, social reproduction, adult-children interaction and materialities * showing the importance of non-(and more-than) representational understanding of the complexities of childhood, family life and alcohol consumption.

This original book explores the importance of geographical processes for policies and professional practices related to childhood and youth. Contributors from a wide range of disciplinary backgrounds explore how concepts such as place, scale, mobility and boundary-making are important for policies and practices in diverse contexts. Chapters present both comprehensive cutting-edge academic research and critical reflections by practitioners working in diverse contexts, giving the volume wide appeal. The focus on the role of geographical processes in policies and professional practices that affect young people provides new, critical insights into contemporary issues and debates. The contributions show how local and national concerns remain central to many youth programmes; they also highlight how youth policies are becoming increasingly globalised. Examples are taken from the UK, the Americas and Africa. The chapters are informed by and advance contemporary theoretical approaches in human geography, sociology, anthropology and youth work, and will be of interest to academics and higher-level students in those disciplines. The book will also appeal to policy-makers and professionals who work with young people, encouraging them to critically reflect upon the role of geographical processes in their own work.

This book discusses already established accounts about the sexualization of children through a theoretical and an empirical framework which bring together popular culture, consumption, sexuality, selfhood and childhood. Adopting the view that the debate about the sexualization of childhood is socially constructed, it pushes beyond the dominant preconceptions about 'the risks of childhood'. Moral judgements about children's welfare are perhaps nowhere more transient and controversial than when it comes to children's sexuality, something that has deep historical roots. However, and contrary to recurrent fears and moral panics about the loss of childhood as a result of a tidal wave of a sexualizing culture, this book theorizes the notion of children's sexualization within the social construction of myths of childhood innocence while also taking into account the extent of young people's actual engagement with media and technology in contemporary Western societies. It is within such a contextual framework that this book unfolds, bringing together a historical contextualization of childhood, sexuality and pornography with contemporary empirical accounts regarding the 'presentation of the self' and self-management.

The general well-being of British adolescents has been the topic of considerable debate in recent years, but too often this is based on myth rather than fact. Are today's young people more stressed, anxious, distressed or antisocial than they used to be? What does research evidence tell us about the adolescent experience today and how it has changed over time? And how do trends in adolescent well-being since the 1970s relate to changes in education, leisure, communities and family life in that time? This unique volume brings together the main findings from the Nuffield Foundation's Changing Adolescence Programme and explores how social change may affect young people's behaviour, mental health and transitions toward adulthood. As well as critiquing research evidence, which will be of interest to a wide academic audience, the book will inform the wider debate on this subject among policy makers and service providers, voluntary organisations and campaign groups.

Although philosophy of childhood has always played some part in philosophical discourse, its emergence as a field of postmodern theory follows the rise, in the late nineteenth century, of psychoanalysis, for which childhood is a key signifier. Then in the mid-twentieth century Philipe Aries's seminal Centuries of Childhood introduced the master-concept of childhood as a social and cultural invention, thereby weakening the strong grip of biological metaphors on imagining childhood. Today, while philosophy of childhood per se is a relatively boundaryless field of inquiry, it is one that has clear distinctions from history, anthropology, sociology, and even psychology of childhood. This volume of essays, which represents the work of a diverse, international set of scholars, explores the shapes and boundaries of the emergent field, and the possibilities for mediating encounters between its multiple sectors, including history of philosophy, philosophy of education, pedagogy, literature and film, psychoanalysis, family studies, developmental theory, ethics, history of subjectivity, history of culture, and evolutionary theory. The result is an engaging introduction to philosophy of childhood for those unfamiliar with this area of scholarship, and a timely compendium and resource for those for whom it is a new disciplinary articulation.

Interpersonal Violence Against Children and Youth uses empirical research to provide an overview of the risk factors, different types of violence against children and youth, their victimizations (online and offline), as well as prevention practices and strategies. Pulling together researchers, practitioners, and educators from around the world, this book addresses the various practices and efforts different countries use to protect children and prevent interpersonal violence. These forms of violence include parental or caregiver initiated, actions of peers, intimate partner-related, or that among strangers and are not limited to maltreatment, bullying, emotional strife, sexual assault, or homicidal violence. This book would be of interest to those studying criminology, criminal justice, sociology, social work, law, forensic pathology and others.

As internet use is extending to younger children, there is an increasing need for research focus on the risks young users are experiencing, as well as the opportunities, and how they should cope. With expert contributions from diverse disciplines and a uniquely cross-national breadth, this timely book examines the prospect of enhanced opportunities for learning, creativity and communication set against the fear of cyberbullying, pornography and invaded privacy by both strangers and peers. Based on an impressive in-depth survey of 25,000 children carried out by the EU Kids Online network, it offers wholly new findings that extend previous research and counter both the optimistic and the pessimistic hype. It argues that, in the main, children are gaining the digital skills, coping strategies and social support they need to navigate this fast-changing terrain. But it also identifies the struggles they encounter, pinpointing those for whom harm can follow from risky online encounters. Each chapter presents new findings and analyses to inform both researchers and students in the social sciences and policy makers in government, industry or child welfare who are working to enhance children's digital experiences.

As internet use is extending to younger children, there is an increasing need for research focus on the risks young users are experiencing, as well as the opportunities, and how they should cope. With expert contributions from diverse disciplines and a uniquely cross-national breadth, this timely book examines the prospect of enhanced opportunities for learning, creativity and communication set against the fear of cyberbullying, pornography and invaded privacy by both strangers and peers. Based on an impressive in-depth survey of 25,000 children carried out by the EU Kids Online network, it offers wholly new findings that extend previous research and counter both the optimistic and the pessimistic hype. It argues that, in the main, children are gaining the digital skills, coping strategies and social support they need to navigate this fast-changing terrain. But it also identifies the struggles they encounter, pinpointing those for whom harm can follow from risky online encounters. Each chapter presents new findings and analyses to inform both researchers and students in the social sciences and policy makers in government, industry or child welfare who are working to enhance children's digital experiences.

The viability, quality and sustainability of publicly supported early childhood education and care services is a lively issue in many countries, especially since the rights of the child imply equal access to provision for all young children. But equitable provision within childcare markets is highly problematic, as parents pay for what they can afford and parental income inequalities persist or widen. This highly topical book presents recent, significant research from eight nations where childcare markets are the norm. It also includes research about 'raw' and 'emerging' childcare markets operating with a minimum of government intervention, mostly in low income countries or post transition economies. Childcare markets compares these childcare marketisation and regulatory processes across the political and economic systems in which they are embedded. Contributions from economists, childcare policy specialists and educationalists address the question of what constraints need to be in place if childcare markets are to deliver an equitable service.

This book radically refigures the conceptual and formal significance of childhood in nineteenth-century English poetry. By theorizing infancy as a poetics as well as a space of continual beginning, Ruderman shows how it allowed poets access to inchoate, uncanny, and mutable forms of subjectivity and art. While recent historicist studies have documented the "freshness of experience" childhood confers on 19th-century poetry and culture, this book draws on new formalist and psychoanalytic perspectives to rethink familiar concepts such as immortality, the sublime, and the death drive as well as forms and genres such as the pastoral, the ode, and the ballad. Ruderman establishes that infancy emerges as a unique structure of feeling simultaneously with new theories of lyric poetry at the end of the eighteenth century. He then explores the intertwining of poetic experimentation and infancy in Wordsworth, Anna Barbauld, Blake, Coleridge, Erasmus Darwin, Sara Coleridge, Shelley, Matthew Arnold, Tennyson, and Augusta Webster. Each chapter addresses and analyzes a specific moment in a writers' work, moments of tenderness or mourning, birth or death, physical or mental illness, when infancy is analogized, eulogized, or theorized. Moving between canonical and archival materials, and combining textual and inter-textual reading, metrical and prosodic analysis, and post-Freudian psychoanalytic theory, the book shows how poetic engagements with infancy anticipate psychoanalytic and phenomenological (i.e. modern) ways of being in the world. Ultimately, Ruderman suggests that it is not so much that we return to infancy as that infancy returns (obsessively, compulsively) in us. This book shows how by tracking changing attitudes towards the idea of infancy, one might also map the emotional, political, and aesthetic terrain of nineteenth-century culture. It will be of interest to scholars in the areas of British romanticism and Victorianism, as well as 19th-

Girls' Series Fiction and American Popular Culture examines the ways in which young female heroines in American series fiction have undergone dramatic changes in the past 150 years, changes which have both reflected and modeled standards of behavior for America's tweens and teen girls. Though series books are often derided for lacking in imagination and literary potency, that the majority of American girls have been exposed to girls' series in some form, whether through books, television, or other media, suggests that this genre needs to be studied further and that the development of the heroines that girls read about have created an impact that is worthy of a fresh critical lens. Thus, this collection explores how series books have influenced and shaped popular American culture and, in doing so, girls' everyday experiences from the mid nineteenth century until now. The collection interrogates the cultural work that is performed through the series genre, contemplating the messages these books relay about subjects including race, class, gender, education, family, romance, and friendship, and it examines the trajectory of girl fiction within such contexts as material culture, geopolitics, socioeconomics, and feminism.

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.

This book is about the relationships and networks - social capital - that children and young people have in and out of school. Social capital has become of increasing interest to policy makers but there has been little evidence of how it operates in practice. In this unique collection, the social capital of children and young people, and in one case parents and teachers, is explored in a wide range of formal and informal settings. The contributors to the book, who include academic researchers and educational professionals, provide in-depth accounts of social capital being developed and used by children and young people. They offer critical reflections on the significance of social capital and on the experiences of researching the social capital of sometimes vulnerable people. This book is essential reading for anyone concerned with how children and young people get along, get by and get on.

Children are recruited to fight in conflicts around the world and violent cruelty characterizes many of the conflicts in which children participate. Some children are perpetrators of some of the worst acts of depraved murder, disfigurement, and terrorism imaginable. They then struggle to reintegrate into communities that were victims of the violence. Taking into account the interests of children and other victims of conflict, and considering the needs of post-conflict communities, this book examines and offers suggestions for how transitional justice practices should conceptualize and address the involvement of child soldiers in violent collective harm.
This book will appeal to a wide range of scholars from International Relations, Criminal Justice, Law, Philosophy, Sociology, Anthropology, Development and African Studies.

The general well-being of British adolescents has been the topic of considerable debate in recent years, but too often this is based on myth rather than fact. Are today's young people more stressed, anxious, distressed or antisocial than they used to be? What does research evidence tell us about the adolescent experience today and how it has changed over time? And how do trends in adolescent well-being since the 1970s relate to changes in education, leisure, communities and family life in that time? This unique volume brings together the main findings from the Nuffield Foundation's Changing Adolescence Programme and explores how social change may affect young people's behaviour, mental health and transitions toward adulthood. As well as critiquing research evidence, which will be of interest to a wide academic audience, the book will inform the wider debate on this subject among policy makers and service providers, voluntary organisations and campaign groups.

This original book explores the importance of geographical processes for policies and professional practices related to childhood and youth. Contributors from a wide range of disciplinary backgrounds explore how concepts such as place, scale, mobility and boundary-making are important for policies and practices in diverse contexts. Chapters present both comprehensive cutting-edge academic research and critical reflections by practitioners working in diverse contexts, giving the volume wide appeal. The focus on the role of geographical processes in policies and professional practices that affect young people provides new, critical insights into contemporary issues and debates. The contributions show how local and national concerns remain central to many youth programmes; they also highlight how youth policies are becoming increasingly globalised. Examples are taken from the UK, the Americas and Africa. The chapters are informed by and advance contemporary theoretical approaches in human geography, sociology, anthropology and youth work, and will be of interest to academics and higher-level students in those disciplines. The book will also appeal to policy-makers and professionals who work with young people, encouraging them to critically reflect upon the role of geographical processes in their own work.

What happens when kids are held captive to an endless stream of MTV-like television commercials? Armed with a tape recorder, Roy F. Fox, a language and literacy researcher, spent two years interviewing over 200 students in rural Missouri schools. Why? Because more than eight million students in 40% of America's schools, every day, watch TV commercials as part of Channel One's news broadcast. Students read commercials far more often than they read "Romeo and Juliet." These ads now constitute America's only national curriculum.

In this ground-breaking study, Fox explores how these commercials affect kids' thinking, language, and behavior. He found that such ads do indeed help shape children into more active consumers. For example, months after a pizza commercial had stopped airing, students reported that one brief scene showed a couple on an airplane. The plane's seats, students noted, were red with little blue squares that have arrows sticking out of them. Also, kids blurred one type of TV text with another, often mistaking Pepsi ads for public service announcements. Kids replayed commercials by repeating or reconstructing an ad in some way--by singing songs, jingles, and catch-phrases; by cheering at sports events (one crowd at a school football game erupted into the Domino's Pizza cheer); by creating art projects that mirrored specific commercials, and even by dreaming about commercials (the product, not the dreamer, is the star).

The Age of Consent; Young People, Sexuality and Citizenship addresses the contentious issue of how children's sexual behaviour should be regulated. The text includes: *A unique history of age of consent laws in the UK, analysed via contemporary social theory *A global comparative survey of age of consent laws and relevant international human rights law *A critical analysis of how protectionist agendas shaped new age of consent laws in England and Wales in the Sexual Offences Act 2003 *In-depth theoretical discussion of the rationale for age of consent laws *An original proposal to reduce the age of consent to 14 for young people who are less than two years apart in age Responding to contemporary concerns about young people's sexual behaviour, sexual abuse and paedophilia, this book will engage readers in law and socio-legal studies, sociology, history, politics, social policy, youth and childhood studies, and gender and sexuality studies; and professionals and practitioners working with young people.

This volume contributes to understanding childhoods in the twentieth and twenty-firstcentury by offering an in-depth overview of children and their engagement with the violent world around them. The chapters deal with different historical, spatial, and cultural contexts, yet converge on the question of how children relate to physiological and psychological violence. The twentieth century has been hailed as the "century of the child" but it has also witnessed an unprecedented escalation of cultural trauma experienced by children during the two World Wars, Holocaust, Partition of the Indian subcontinent, and Vietnam War. The essays in this volume focus on victimized childhood during instances of war, ethnic violence, migration under compulsion, rape, and provide insights into how a child negotiates with abstract notions of nation, ethnicity, belonging, identity, and religion. They use an array of literary and cinematic representations-fiction, paintings, films, and popular culture-to explore the long-term effect of violence and neglect on children. As such, they lend voice to children whose experiences of abuse have been multifaceted, ranging from genocide, conflict and xenophobia to sexual abuse, and also consider ways of healing. With contributions from across the world, this comprehensive book will be useful to scholars and researchers of cultural studies, literature, education, education policy, gender studies, child psychology, sociology, political studies, childhood studies, and those studying trauma, conflict, and resilience.