This book analyzes different figurations of childhood in contemporary culture and politics with a particular focus on interdisciplinary methodologies of critical childhood studies. It argues that while the figure of the child has been traditionally located at the peripheries of academic disciplines, perhaps most notably in history, sociology and literature, the proposed critical discussions of the ideological, symbolic and affective roles that children play in contemporary societies suggest that they are often the locus of larger societal crises, collective psychic tensions, and unspoken prohibitions and taboos. As such, this book brings into focus the prejudices against childhood embedded in our standard approaches to organizing knowledge, and asks: is there a natural disciplinary home for the study of childhood? Or is this field fundamentally interdisciplinary, peripheral or problematic to notions of disciplinary identity? In this respect, does childhood force innovation in thinking about disciplinarity? For instance, how does the analysis of childhood affect how we think about methodology? What role do understandings of childhood play in delimiting how we conceive of our society, our future, and ourselves? How does thinking about childhood affect how we think about culture, history, and politics? This book brings together researchers working broadly in critical child studies, but from various disciplines in the humanities and social sciences (including philosophy, literary studies, sociology, cultural studies and history), in order to stage a conversation between these diverse perspectives on the disciplinary or (interdisciplinary) character of 'the child' as an object of research. Such conversation builds on the assumption that childhood, far from being marginal, is a topic that is hidden in plain sight. That is to say, while the child is always a presence in culture, history, literature and philosophy-and is often even a highly charged figure within those fields-its operation and effects are rarely theoretically scrutinized, but rather are more likely drawn upon, surreptitiously, for another purpose.

The book sheds light on the transformation of childhood in Singapore, over our many milestones. It is a collection of lectures by distinguished authorities on various aspects of childhood. They encompass a rich mix of historical material and personal anecdotes garnered from the speakers themselves and their respective professional expertise. Salient questions from the audience are also included with the speakers' replies.

The second volume of Priscilla Alderson's popular and renowned book Childhoods Real and Imagined relates dialectical critical realism to childhood. By demonstrating their relevance and value to each other, Alderson presents a practical introductory guide for applying critical realism to research about children and young people. Each chapter summarises key themes from several academic disciplines and policy areas, ranging from climate change and social justice between generations, to neoliberalism, social reform and imagining utopias. Children's and adults' views and experiences are reviewed, and whereas the first volume deals with more personal and local aspects of childhood, this volume widens the scope into debates about global politics, which so seldom mention children. Each chapter demonstrates how children and young people are an integral part of the whole of society and are often especially affected by policies and events. This book is written for everyone who is researching, studying or teaching about childhood, or who cares for and works with children and young people, as well as those interested in critical realist approaches.

Sometimes a war's greatest heroes are its survivors, those who manage to forge new lives despite the tragedy they have experienced. For the sixteen unsung heroes profiled in Beyond Their Years, surviving also meant surrendering their childhood. These children found themselves on the edge of the fray - both in combat and in the throes of daily life - helping, or simply enduring, as best their interrupted youths allowed. Their behind-the-scenes stories illustrate what it was really like for children during the Civil War. Meet Ransom Powell, a thirteen-year-old drummer boy who survived grueling Confederate prison camps; writer and patriot Maggie Campbell, only eight years old when the war ended; Ulysses S. Grant's son Jesse, who rode proudly alongside Abraham Lincoln's son Tad and Ella Sheppard, daughter of a slave mother and a freed father, who lived through the backlash of slave rebellions. Each of these young survivors' lives represent an amazing contribution to the war effort and to postbellum life. Learn the inspiring stories of these American children who displayed courage, devotion, and wisdom beyond their years.

"Each chapter contains recommendations for legislators, policy makers, researchers, and families. This book should be on the desk, and minds, of legislators, attorneys, social workers and other mental health professionals who encounter and wish to ameliorate the effects of violence in the lives of their young constituents, clients, and patients." -JOURNAL OF CHILD AND FAMILY STUDIES Questions relating to violence and children surround us in the media: should V-chips be placed in every television set? How can we prevent another Columbine school shooting from occurring? How should pornography on the internet be regulated? The Handbook of Children, Culture and Violence addresses these questions and more, providing a comprehensive, interdisciplinary examination of childhood violence that considers children as both consumers and perpetrators of violence, as well as victims of it. The Handbook offers much-needed empirical evidence that will help inform debate about these important policy decisions. Moreover, it is the first single volume to consider situations when children are responsible for violence, rather than focusing exclusively on occasions when they are victimized. Providing the first comprehensive overview of current research in the field, the editors have brought together the work of a group of prominent scholars whose work is united by a common concern for the impact of violence on the lives of children. The Handbook of Children, Culture and Violence is poised to become the ultimate resource and reference work on children and violence for researchers, teachers, and students of psychology, human development and family studies, law, communications, education, sociology, and political science/ public policy. It will also appeal to policymakers, media professionals, and special interest groups concerned with reducing violence in children's lives. Law firms specializing in family law, as well as think tanks, will also be interested in the Handbook.

A Therapist's Guide to Child Development gives therapists and counselors the basics they need to understand their clients in the context of development and to explain development to parents. The chapters take the reader through the various physical, social, and identity developments occurring at each age, explaining how each stage of development is closely linked to mental health and how that is revealed in therapy. This ideal guide for students, as well as early and experienced professionals, will also give readers the tools to communicate successfully with the child's guardians or teachers, including easy-to-read handouts that detail what kind of behaviors are not cause for concern and which behaviors mean it's time to seek help. As an aid to practitioners, this book matches developmental ages with appropriate, evidence-based mental health interventions.

What was it like growing up in the Great Depression, and how did America's youngest citizens contribute to the history of that fateful decade? In The Greatest Generation Grows Up, Kriste Lindenmeyer shows that the experiences of depression-era children help us understand the course of the 1930s as well as the history of American childhood. For the first time, she notes, federal policy extended childhood dependence through the teen years while cultural changes reinforced this ideal of modern childhood. Grade-based grammar schools and high schools expanded rapidly, strengthening age-based distinctions among children and segregating them further from the world of adults. Radio broadcasters, filmmakers, and manufacturers began to market their products directly to children and teens, powerfully linking consumerism and modern childhood. In all, the thirties experience worked to confer greater identity on American children, and Ms. Lindenmeyer's story provides essential background for understanding the legacy of those men and women whom Tom Brokaw has called "America's greatest generation." While many children suffered terribly during these years-and are remembered vividly in the Farm Security Administration's stunning photographs of the era-Ms. Lindenmeyer argues that an exclusive focus on those who were ill-housed, ill-fed, and ill-clothed neglects the contributions and widely varied experiences of American youngsters. The decade's important changes touched the lives of all children and teenagers. By 1940, the image of an idyllic modern childhood had been strengthened in law and confirmed in culture by the depression years. With 21 black-and-white illustrations.

Uzbekistan is the world's fifth largest producer and second largest exporter of cotton in the world, and unlike other countries where child labor is common, it is the totalitarian state of Uzbekistan's official policy to employ children. This book discusses the use of child labor in cotton cultivation in Uzbekistan following the fall of the Soviet Union, drawing on an extensive field investigation and in-depth interviews with human rights activists, government officials, and social workers.

Jeanne Soileau, a teacher in New Orleans and south Louisiana for more than forty years, examines how children's folklore, especially among African Americans, has changed. From the tumult of integration to the present, her experience afforded unique opportunities to observe children as they played. With integration in New Orleans during the 1960s, Soileau notes how children began to play with one another almost immediately. Children taught each other play routines, chants, jokes, jump-rope rhymes, cheers, taunts, and teases - all the folk games that happen in normal play on the street and playground. When adults - the judges and attorneys, the parents, and the politicians - haggled and shouted, children began to hold hands in a circle, fall down together to ""Ring around the Rosie,"" and tease each other in new and creative ways. Children's ability to adapt can be seen not only in their response to social change, but in how they adopt and utilize pop culture and technology. Vast technological changes in the last third of the twentieth century influenced the way children sang, danced, played, and interacted. Soileau catalogs these changes and studies how games evolve and transform as much as they are preserved. She includes several topics of study: oral narratives and songs, jokes and tales, and teasing formulae gleaned from mostly African American sources. Because much of the field work took place on public school playgrounds, this body of oral narratives remains of particular interest to teachers, folklorists, linguists, and those who study play. In the end, Soileau shows that despite the restrictions of air-conditioning, shorter recess periods, ever-increasing hours of television watching, the growing popularity of video games, and carefully scripted after-school activities, many children in south Louisiana sustain traditional games. At the same time, they invent varied and clever new ones. As Soileau observes, children strive through their folk play to learn how to fit into a rapidly changing society.

Childhood is not only a biological age, it is also a social construct. The essays in this collection range chronologically from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century, and geographically across England, France, Germany, Italy and Spain. They chart the depictions of children in various media including painting, sculpture and the graphic arts.

Debates about children's rights not only concern those things that children have a right to have and to do but also our broader social and political community, and the moral and political status of the child within it. This book examines children's rights and citizenship in the USA, UK and Australia and analyses the policy, law and sociology that govern the transition from childhood to adulthood. By examining existing debates on childhood citizenship, the author pursues the claim that childhood is the most heavily governed period of a liberal individual's life, and argues that childhood is an intensely monitored period that involves a 'politics of becoming adult'. Drawing upon case studies from the USA, the UK and Australia, this concept is used to critically analyse debates and policy concerning children's citizenship, criminality, and sexuality. In doing so, the book seeks to uncover what informs and limits how we think about, talk about, and govern children's rights in liberal societies. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of political science, governance, social policy, ethics, politics of childhood and public policy.

Since the adoption of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989) children's rights have assumed a central position in a wide variety of disciplines and policies. This handbook offers an engaging overview of the contemporary research landscape for those people in the theory and practice of children's rights. The volume offers a multidisciplinary approach to children's rights, as well as key thematic issues in children's rights at the intersection of global and local concerns. The main approaches and topics within the volume are: * Law, social work, and the sociology of childhood and anthropology * Geography, childhood studies, gender studies and citizenship studies * Participation, education and health * Juvenile justice and alternative care * Violence against children and female genital mutilation * Child labour, working children and child poverty * Migration, indigenous children and resource exploitation The specially commissioned chapters have been written by renowned scholars and researchers and come together to provide a critical and invaluable guide to the challenges and dilemmas currently facing children's rights.

Mothers of Adult Children elucidates what happens when children come of age and leave home, creating new lives in the realms of work and relationships. Mothers from around the world learn that this is the point in which their relationships with their children must drastically change. Mothers often come to terms with the changes by accepting differences and providing moral and emotional support when needed. However, the evolutionary nature of mothers' roles throughout the course of their children's lives is not only determined by the mother-child dynamic. The mothering of adult children is a transformative role, and the stories presented here show that the dynamics between mother and child are also influenced by cultural events. Accidents, disasters, war, and other hardships also intervene in these stories of multicultural motherhood. This book reveals the problems mothers of adult children face and celebrates the outstanding accomplishments of those who mother through hardship.

While at first glance it may seem strange that so many films portray children as monstrous characters, the essays in this collection begin by recognizing the pervasive popularity, and the wide variety, of such characterizations. Perhaps because of the wisdom received from our Romantic forebears about the purity of the child, fictional imaginings of children as monsters exercise a tremendous fascination for film audiences, and have for several decades. These opposing, and yet co-dependent, tendencies are reflected in the modern connotations of the phrases child-like (innocent) and childish (selfish, perhaps even evil.) Yet unlike most previous scholarly work on this cultural phenomenon, the essays in this collection do not remain arrested by this reductive binary, but strive to unearth the many possibilities, meanings and forms that are hidden by the two-faced mask our imaginings of children all too often wear.

The child in many post-apocalyptic films occupies a unique space within the narrative, a space that oscillates between death and destruction, faith and hope. The Child in Post-Apocalyptic Cinema interrogates notions of the child as a symbol of futurity and also loss. By exploring the ways children function discursively within a dystopian framework we may better understand how and why traditional notions of childhood are repeatedly tethered to sites of adult conflict and disaster, a connection that often functions to reaffirm the "rightness" of past systems of social order. This collection features critical articles that explore the role of the child character in post-apocalyptic cinema, including classic, recent, and international films, approached from a variety of theoretical, methodological, and cultural perspectives.

Launched in 1971, Adolescent Psychiatry, in the words of founding coeditors Sherman C. Feinstein, Peter L. Giovacchinni, and Arthur A. Miller, promised "to explore adolescence as a process . . . to enter challenging and exciting areas that may have profound effects on our basic concepts." Further, they promised "a series that will provide a forum for the expression of ideas and problems that plague and excite so many of us working in this enigmatic but fascinating field." For over two decades, Adolescent Psychiatry has fulfilled this promise. The repository of a wealth of original studies by preeminent clinicians, developmental researchers, and social scientists specializing in this stage of life, the series has become an essential resource for all mental health practitioners working with youth. With volume 22, the editorship of Adolescent Psychiatry passes to Aaron E. Esman, a distinguished clinician and educator whose wide-ranging sensibilities gain expression in a collection rich in clinical, developmental, and scholarly insight. Encompassing developmental topics (adolescent daydreams) timely clinical issues (eating disorders, impulse control disorders, narcissistic and antisocial pathology), historical commentaries (Shakespeare's adolescents, Nietzsche's romantic construction of adolescence, Freud's Dora as an adolescent), and a special section on "ambient genocide and adolescence," volume 22 ably meets the needs of professional and scholarly readers interested in this vitally important stage of life.

Based on eye-witness accounts, interviews, and prodigious research by the author, who is an expert in the field, this is a unique contribution to the literature of World War II, and a most compelling account of German inhumanity towards children in occupied Poland.

Childhoods in context offers a critical exploration of childhood, drawing attention to the physical and social context of children and young people's lives. Three key themes are explored: * Childhood is always located somewhere. The book offers insights into childhood by focusing on places specially designed for children as well as the territories that children develop for themselves. * Childhood is experienced through objects, people and places and through everyday routines. Discussions about childhood are rooted in the details of children's lives, whether on the street, in an institution or in different definitions of home. * Childhood and adult identities are relational. Definitions and understandings of childhood are dependent on how adulthood is viewed. These themes are explored through accounts of home and family, school, public spaces and sites of work in local and global settings. They raise questions about methodological approaches to understanding childhoods in context which is the focus of the concluding chapter. This is the third in a series of four books, written by experts in the field, which provides an introduction to childhood degree programmes and related modules. The series features international case studies, examples and readings to supplement the chapters, and is illustrated in full colour. Other books in the series are: * Understanding childhood: a cross-disciplinary approach * Children and young people's cultural worlds * Local childhoods, global issues

Children: Rights and Childhood is widely regarded as the rst book to offer a detailed philosophical examination of children s rights. David Archard provides a clear and accessible introduction to a topic that has assumed increasing relevance since the book s rst publication. Divided clearly into three parts, it covers key topics such as:

• John Locke s writings on children
• Philippe Aries s Centuries of Childhood
• children s moral and legal rights
• a child s right to vote and to sexual choice
• parental rights to privacy and autonomy
• de ning and understanding child abuse.

The third edition has been fully revised and updated throughout with a new chapter providing an in-depth analysis of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) and Part II has been restructured to move the reader from general theoretical considerations of children s rights through to practical issues. This volume is ideal reading for advanced studies across Philosophy, Social Work, Law, Childhood Studies, Politics, and Social Policy."

First published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Launched in 1971, Adolescent Psychiatry, in the words of founding coeditors Sherman C. Feinstein, Peter L. Giovacchinni, and Arthur A. Miller, promised "to explore adolescence as a process . . . to enter challenging and exciting areas that may have profound effects on our basic concepts." Further, they promised "a series that will provide a forum for the expression of ideas and problems that plague and excite so many of us working in this enigmatic but fascinating field." For over two decades, Adolescent Psychiatry has fulfilled this promise. The repository of a wealth of original studies by preeminent clinicians, developmental researchers, and social scientists specializing in this stage of life, the series has become an essential resource for all mental health practitioners working with youth. Volume 23 of The Annals begins with the late Richard Marohn's reexamination of Peter Blos's concept of "prolonged adolescence," followed by contributions on the developmental roots of adolescent disturbances, the role of family interactions in adolescent depression, the establishment of a therapeutic alliance with adolescents, and the treatment of narcissistically disordered adolescents. The assessment and treatment of adolescent substance abuse and of psychosomatic and depressive symptoms in adolescence receive timely consideration. In a concluding section on "School-Based and Preventive Programs," contributors address a range of important issues, from adolescent sex and AIDS, to the provision of mental health services in public and private schools, to the need for school-based suicide postvention programs. In summary, volume 23 shows adolescent psychiatry to be as vital as ever, building on the clinical wisdom of the past while responding to the urgent challenges of the day.

Harvey Schwartz's territory is the severe end of the child sexual abuse continuum, where victims' experiences are so unthinkable and their adaptations so bizarre that the rest of us are tempted to pronounce them fictions-whereupon we become complicit by subverting the survivors' struggles to heal. Schwartz synthesizes trauma theory and relational psychoanalysis to make sense of perpetrator, collaborator, and victim pathologies, and exposes the tortuous double-binds of therapy for and with dissociative patients. His office is the last stop on a kind of underground treatment railroad; his say-it-isn't-so case material reverberates throughout.

When the first edition of this seminal work appeared in 1990, the sociology of childhood was only just beginning to emerge as a distinct sub-discipline. Drawing together strands of existing sociological writing about childhood and shaping them into a new paradigm, the original edition of this Routledge Classic offered a potent blend of ideas that informed, even inspired, many empirical studies of children s lives because it provided a unique lens through which to think about childhood. Featuring a collection of articles which summarised the developments in the study of childhood across the social sciences, including history, psychology, sociology, anthropology, feminist and developmental studies, scholars and professionals from developed and developing countries world-wide shared their knowledge of having worked and of working with children.

Now with a new introduction from the editors to contextualise it into the 21st century, this truly ground-breaking text which helped establish childhood studies as a distinctive field of enquiry is being republished.

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The volumes in this series illustrate how social organization and private, emotional experience are different phases of the social process. They show the steps by which emotional experience is shaped by social structural, macro-level processes and how these processes are changed by experience.