First published in 1986, this book reviews research on the role parents play in fostering the early development of children with mental handicaps. Professionals and parents must work together to give such children the chance of living as ordinary lives as possible and here, the author develops a broadly-based conceptual framework for the involvement of parents as teachers of their young handicapped children. McConachie identifies characteristics of parents which seem of particular relevance to the design and success of intervention programmes. Although written in the 1980s, this book discusses topics that are still important today.

First published in 1984, this book focuses on the support and reassurance needed by parents of children with handicaps. It provides a practical guide in relation to daily care and is equally as relevant to professionals, therapists, teachers, doctors and psychologists who must advise parents. Written by an Occupational Therapist, the book highlights the need to make such children as independent as possible and gives advice on care of a special baby, modifications to the home environment, the needs of a child with a physical handicap, problems of educational handicap, and the place of a child in the family and community.

This book offers an engaging study that analyses contemporary childhood by examining new lines of argument about diversity, disability and difference. The author critiques the key issues that affect both adults' and children's quality of life, including market-driven values, poverty and civic disengagement.In this fascinating study, Dimitra Hartas analyses contemporary childhood. She discusses the plurality inherent in childhood and the cultural, ideological, social and biological forces that shape children's experience of growing up in the 21st century. She engages with new lines of argument about diversity, disability and difference, and critiques the big issues that affect both adults' and children's quality of life such as market-driven values, poverty and civic disengagement.Hartas uncovers evidence of how the right to childhood is being violated in both the developed and developing world and how our consumerist culture is shaping children's lives in ways that are not always understood, and advocates the right to childhoods. She concludes by discussing the implications of her findings for both policy and practice in early childhood education, and examines pedagogies that are responsive to ethics, diversity and difference.

First published in 1981, this work is based on the author's research in the playgrounds of two Oxford schools. It describes the order amongst the apparent chaos by relating the playtime activities - the games, rhymes and taunts of five-to-ten-year-olds in first and middle schools - to children's goals, problems and solutions. It shows how children learn and display in the playground a remarkably complex set of social skills and the study clearly demonstrates the importance of playtime for preparing a child to cope in the adult world.

Unaccompanied minor migrants are underage migrants, who for various reasons leave their country and are separated from their parents or legal/customary guardians. Some of them live entirely by themselves, while others join their relatives or other adults in a foreign country. The concept of the best interests of a child is widely applied in international, national legal documents and several guidelines and often pertains to unaccompanied minor migrants given that they are separated from parents, who are not able to exercise their basic parental responsibilities. This book takes an in-depth look at the issues surrounding the best interests of the child in relation to unaccompanied minor migrants drawing on social, legal and political sciences in order to understand children's rights not only as a matter of positive law but mainly as a social practice depending on personal biographies, community histories and social relations of power. The book tackles the interpretation of the rights of the child and the best interests principle in the case of unaccompanied minor migrants in Europe at political, legal and practical levels. In its first part the book considers theoretical aspects of children's rights and the best interests of the child in relation to unaccompanied minor migrants. Adopting a critical approach to the implementation of the Convention of Rights of a Child authors nevertheless confirm its relevance for protecting minor migrants' rights in practice. Authors deconstruct power relations residing within the discourses of children's rights and best interests, demonstrating that these rights are constructed and decided upon by those in power who make decisions on behalf of those who do not possess authority. Authors further on explore normative and methodological aspects of Article 3 of the Convention on the Rights of a Child and its relevance for asylum and migration legislation. The second part of the book goes on to examine the actual legal framework related to unaccompanied minor migrants and implementation of children's' rights and their best interests in the reception, protection, asylum and return procedures. The case studies are based on from the empirical research, on interviews with key experts and unaccompanied minor migrants in Austria, France, Slovenia and United Kingdom. Examining age assessment procedures, unaccompanied minors' survivals strategies and their everyday life in reception centres the contributors point to the discrepancy between the states' obligations to take the best interest of the child into account when dealing with unaccompanied minor migrants, and the lack of formal procedures of best interest determination in practice. The chapters expose weaknesses and failures of institutionalized systems in selected European countries in dealing with unaccompanied children and young people on the move.

Bringing together new perspectives in childhood studies and animal studies, this book is the first collection to critically address the manifold alignments and frequent co-constitutions of children and pets in our families, our cultures, and our societies. The cultural politics of power shaping relationships between children, pets, and adults inform the wide range of essays included in this collection, as they explore issues such as protection, discipline, mastery, wildness, play, and domestication. The volume use the frequent social and cultural intersections between children and pets as an opportunity to analyze institutions that create pet and child subjectivity, from education and training to putting children and pets on display for entertainment purposes. Essays analyze legal discourses, visual culture, literature for children and adults, migration narratives, magazines for children, music, and language socialization to discuss how notions of nationalism, race, gender, heteronormativity, and speciesism shape cultural constructions of children and pets. Examining childhood and pethood in America, Europe, Asia, and the Pacific, this collection shows how discourses linking children and pets are pervasive and work across cultures. By presenting innovative approaches to the child and the pet, the book brings to light alternative paths toward understanding these figures, leading to new openings and questions about kinship, agency, and the power of care that so often shapes our relationships with children and animals. This will be an important volume for scholars of animal studies, childhood studies, children's literature, cultural studies, political theory, education, art history, and sociology.

Conflict Narratives in Middle Childhood presents evidence from twenty years of research, examining nearly 3,000 narratives from 1,600 children in eight settings in two countries about their own experiences with interpersonal conflict. Close readings, combined with systematic analysis of dozens of features of the stories reveal that when children are invited to write or talk about their own conflicts, they produce accounts that are often charming and sometimes heartbreaking, and that always bring to light their social, emotional, and moral development. Children's personal stories about conflict reveal how they create and maintain friendships, how they understand and react to the social aggression that threatens those friendships, and how they understand and cope with physical aggression ranging from the pushing and poking of peers to criminal violence in their neighborhoods or families. Sometimes children describe the efforts of adults to influence their conflicts - efforts they sometimes welcome and sometimes resist. Their stories show them 'taking on' gender and other cultural commitments. We are not just watching children become more and more like us as they move through the elementary school years - we are watching them become the architects of a future we will only see to the extent that we understand their way of making sense.

Discrimination impacts most youth at some point. Almost all children and adolescents belong to at least one stigmatized group, whether they are a Black or Latino boy in school; an immigrant or refugee; a gay, lesbian, or bisexual teen; or a girl in physics class. Discrimination on the basis of race/ethnicity, immigration status, gender, sexual orientation, and gender identity can have long-term academic, psychological, and social repercussions, especially when it is directed at a cognitively developing child or an emotionally vulnerable adolescent. How children and adolescents are impacted by this discrimination depends on their cognitive ability to perceive the bias, the context in which the bias occurs, and resources they have to help cope with the bias. This book details, synthesizes, and analyzes the perception and impact of discrimination in childhood and adolescence across multiple stigmatized social groups to help us better understand the complex phenomenon of discrimination and its long-term consequences. By looking at the similarities and differences in discrimination across all social groups, we can more fully understand its mechanisms of influence. Before we can fully address the persistent achievement gap between White and ethnic minority children, the high rates of suicidal thoughts among LGBT youth, and the underrepresentation of girls in STEM careers, we must first examine the ways in which discrimination influences and is understood by children, with their unique cognitive constraints and within the specific contexts in which they live.

Conflict Narratives in Middle Childhood presents evidence from twenty years of research, examining nearly 3,000 narratives from 1,600 children in eight settings in two countries about their own experiences with interpersonal conflict. Close readings, combined with systematic analysis of dozens of features of the stories reveal that when children are invited to write or talk about their own conflicts, they produce accounts that are often charming and sometimes heartbreaking, and that always bring to light their social, emotional, and moral development. Children's personal stories about conflict reveal how they create and maintain friendships, how they understand and react to the social aggression that threatens those friendships, and how they understand and cope with physical aggression ranging from the pushing and poking of peers to criminal violence in their neighborhoods or families. Sometimes children describe the efforts of adults to influence their conflicts - efforts they sometimes welcome and sometimes resist. Their stories show them 'taking on' gender and other cultural commitments. We are not just watching children become more and more like us as they move through the elementary school years - we are watching them become the architects of a future we will only see to the extent that we understand their way of making sense.

Today's children spend more time than ever before watching television, playing computer games and reading comic and pulp fiction. Many of these are directly designed by the toy and media industry. Are children therefore simply being manipulated? There is widespread concern that because of these kinds of popular fiction, children do not read `quality' literature, resulting in lower standards of literacy. There is also the further fear that because many of these popular media portray highly stereotyped, gendered images, this too will have a damaging effect on children. Mary Hilton's fascinating book proves that there is another side to the argument. We do not have to view popular culture as a threat to our children or their education. The writers of this collection show how, used carefully alongside other types of literature, popular culture can actually help teachers to develop literacy in a broad and positive sense.

This book provides an insight into girls' cultural identities and young femininities through an understanding of tween girls' dressing in Singapore. The book adopts a girl-centred approach to shed light on the narratives and experiences of young Singaporean girls that have often been overlooked. It draws on the conversations with young Singaporean girls aged 8 to 12 to understand how they wanted to dress, from where they gained their inspiration, and what the social factors were that influenced their dressing. Through understanding how girls want to fashion themselves, the book shows that it is imprecise to discuss issues based on the assumption that there is one dominant, 'correct' way to grow up as a young person in Singapore. This book unpacks how young Singaporean girls negotiate their cultural identities through clothing that do not simply conform to or reflect their roles as students. It also shows how girlhood in Singapore is multi-faceted and the values and meanings that tween girls' attach to their dressing intersect at the personal, social, and cultural level. The book offers new ways of approaching and looking at girls' adult-like dressing that move beyond the discourse of sexualisation. In establishing a space for young Singaporean girls' voices in an area that has been dominated by studies from the West, this book also shows how the focus on tween girls in Asia can contribute to and advance the current state of girls' studies.

Since 1992, marijuana use among 8th graders has tripled, among 10th graders it has nearly doubled, and its use among high school seniors has increased by 50 percent. The use of other illicit drugs is also heavily on the rise. Yet, there exists very little research and literature on the etiology and prevention of drug abuse among those most at risk--disadvantaged, inner-city, minority youth. The Etiology and Prevention of Drug Abuse Among Minority Youth is an important first step in remedying this gap in the literature and for getting at the heart of the psychosocial factors that promote and sustain drug use among minority youth.The book's chapters evolved from a program of research funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse and Cornell University Medical College's Institute for Prevention Research concerning drug abuse prevention with multi-ethnic youth. So that you might learn effective strategies for intervening with at-risk adolescents and teenagers, The Etiology and Prevention of Drug Abuse Among Minority Youth discusses: correlates and predictors of alcohol and drug use community-based skills interventions how youths offset feelings of distress or self-derogation by bonding with deviant peers the advantages of community-oriented outreach programs the role of cultural factors as they shape vulnerability to adolescent alcohol and drug use the role of ethnic identity as a moderator of psychosocial risk for alcohol and marijuana use the needs of youth at high risk for future use preventing gateway drug use drug use among youth living in homeless shelters the conditions of public housing and how they affect the etiology of drug abuseAn essential tool for policymakers, social workers, clinicians, researchers, psychiatrists, and other professionals in chemical dependency and narcotics rehabilitation, The Etiology and Prevention of Drug Abuse Among Minority Youth provides you with vital insight on the causes of drug use among minority adolescents, the strengths and limitations of different intervention approaches, and incentive to find appropriate ways for working with at-risk, minority teenagers.

Is the bicycle, like the loudspeaker, a medium of communication in India? Do Indian children need trade unions as much as they need schools? What would you do with a mobile phone if all your friends were playing tag in the rain or watching Indian Idol? Children and Media in India illuminates the experiences, practices and contexts in which children and young people in diverse locations across India encounter, make, or make meaning from media in the course of their everyday lives. From textbooks, television, film and comics to mobile phones and digital games, this book examines the media available to different socioeconomic groups of children in India and their articulation with everyday cultures and routines. An authoritative overview of theories and discussions about childhood, agency, social class, caste and gender in India is followed by an analysis of films and television representations of childhood informed by qualitative interview data collected between 2005 and 2015 in urban, small-town and rural contexts with children aged nine to 17. The analysis uncovers and challenges widely held assumptions about the relationships among factors including sociocultural location, media content and technologies, and children's labour and agency. The analysis casts doubt on undifferentiated claims about how new technologies 'affect', 'endanger' and/or 'empower', pointing instead to the importance of social class - and caste - in mediating relationships among children, young people and the poor. The analysis of children's narratives of daily work, education, caring and leisure supports the conclusion that, although unrecognised and underrepresented, subaltern children's agency and resourceful conservation makes a significant contribution to economic, interpretive and social reproduction in India.

Drawing on examples from British world expressions of Christianity, this collection further greater understanding of religion as a critical element of modern children's and young people's history. It builds on emerging scholarship that challenges the view that religion had a solely negative impact on nineteenth- and twentieth-century children, or that 'secularization' is the only lens to apply to childhood and religion. Putting forth the argument that religion was an abiding influence among British world children throughout the nineteenth and most of the twentieth centuries, this volume places 'religion' at the center of analysis and discussion. At the same time, it positions the religious factor within a broader social and cultural framework. The essays focus on the historical contexts in which religion was formative for children in various 'British' settings denoted as 'Anglo' or 'colonial' during the nineteenth and early- to mid-twentieth centuries. These contexts include mission fields, churches, families, Sunday schools, camps, schools and youth movements. Together they are treated as 'sites' in which religion contributed to identity formation, albeit in different ways relating to such factors as gender, race, disability and denomination. The contributors develop this subject for childhoods that were experienced largely, but not exclusively, outside the 'metropole', in a diversity of geographical settings. By extending the geographic range, even within the British world, it provides a more rounded perspective on children's global engagement with religion.

This book provides an engaging and informative insight into the experiences, dreams and hopes of children and teenagers in contemporary Ireland. O'Connor analyzes a unique data set: a random sample of 4,100 texts drawn from roughly 34,000 texts written by young people aged 10-12 years and 14-17 years, in response to a nationwide invitation to describe themselves and the Ireland they inhabit. The young people's voices give the book a vivid reality, which is illuminated by the application of sociological concepts including global and local, individualization, and ways of 'doing boy/girl.'

The study leads us towards a better understanding of contemporary social problems by locating these young people's accounts within the broader context of cultural change where collective identities have become weaker; where the local is enmeshed with the global; where children anticipate a predictable future and teenagers focus on an extended present; where gender is no longer salient but yet in many ways remains a submerged framework mapping their life styles, life choices and relationships. Written in an accessible style, the book presents a picture that is sometimes challenging, sometimes reassuring but always informative. Containing extensive quotations, it will be of interest not only to students and lecturers in sociology, education, child and youth studies, Irish studies and psychology but to thoughtful parents and teachers at first and second level, and especially those whose students took part in the Write Hear, Write Now project.

This book takes on current perspectives on children's relationships to literacy, media, childhood, markets and transtionalism in converging global worlds. It introduces the idea of multi-sited imaginaries to explain how children's media and literacy performances shape and are shaped by shared visions of communities that we collectively imagine, including play, media, gender, family, school, or cultural worlds. It draws upon elements of ethnographies of globalization, nexus analysis and performance theories to examine the convergences of such imaginaries across multiple sites: early childhood and elementary classrooms and communities in Puerto Rico and the Midwest United States. In this work we attempt to understand that the local moment of engagement within play, dramatic experiences, and literacies is not a given but is always emerging from and within the multiple localities children navigate and the histories, possibilities and challenges they bring to the creative moment.

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.

Despite the existence of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child there still exists a debate on whether children can really hold rights. This book presents a clear theory of children's rights by examining controversial case studies. The author presents a pathway to translating rights into practical social and political instruments for change.

This book provides the latest information about the development of intersensory perception -- a topic which has recently begun to receive a great deal of attention from researchers studying the general problem of perceptual development. This interest was inspired after the realization that unimodal perception of sensory information is only the first stage of perceptual processing. Under normal conditions, an organism is faced with multiple, multisensory sources of information and its task is to either select a single relevant source of information or select several sources of information and integrate them. In general, perception and action on the basis of multiple sources of information is more efficient and effective. Before greater efficiency and effectiveness can be achieved, however, the organism must be able to integrate the multiple sources of information. By doing so, the organism can then achieve a coherent and unified percept of the world. The various chapters in this book examine the developmental origins of intersensory perceptual capacities by presenting the latest research on the development of intersensory perceptual skills in a variety of different species. By adopting a comparative approach to this problem, this volume as a whole helps uncover similarities as well as differences in the mechanisms underlying the development of intersensory integration. In addition, it shows that there is no longer any doubt that intersensory interactions occur right from the beginning of the developmental process, that the nature of these intersensory interactions changes as development progresses, and that early experience contributes in important ways to these changes.

Children are significant consumers of services such as health, welfare, educational institutions and the environment. Alongside this, the marketization of childhood means that children are exposed to advertising and marketing through a wide range of media on a daily basis. Examining key debates on children's power, status and citizenship issues, it considers the wider implications of how consumerism impacts on children's health, well-being and life chances. This timely book explores childhood and consumerism through four key strands: children as consumers of services; children as consumers of space; the link between citizenship and consumption; the influences of the marketization of childhood. Rethinking Children as Consumers will be essential reading for students, researchers, practitioners and policy makers who are interested in the topic of consumerism across early childhood, childhood, youth and society.

This account of an evangelical initiative at Lake Tanganyika was first published in 1892. It looks at Ujiji society and commerce and includes a description and comparison of the peoples that was done for the Anthropological Institute.

Joining the emergent interdisciplinary investment in bridging the social sciences and the humanities, Childhood, Agency, and Fantasy: Walking in Other Worlds explores linkages between children's agency and fantasy. Fantasy as an integral aspect of childhood and as a genre allows for children's spectacular dreams and hopeful realities. Friendship, family, identity, loyalty, belongingness, and emotionality are central concepts explored in chapters that are anchored by humanities texts of television, film, and literature, but also by social science qualitative methods of participant observation and interviews. Fantasy has the capacity to be a revolutionary change agent that in its modernity can creatively reflect, critique, or reimagine the social, political, and cultural norms of our world. Such promise is also found to be true of children's agency, wherein children's beings and becomings, rooted in childhood's freedoms and constraints, result in a range of outcomes. In the endeavor to expand theory and research on children's agency, fantasy becomes a point of possibility with its expanding subjectivities, far-reaching terrain, and spirit of adventure.

"Fostering Nation? Canada Confronts Its History of Childhood Disadvantage" explores the missteps and the promise of a century and more of child protection efforts by Canadians and their governments. It is the first volume to offer a comprehensive history of what life has meant for North America's most disadvantaged Aboriginal and newcomer girls and boys.

Gender, class, race, and (dis)ability are always important factors that bear on youngsters' access to resources. State fostering initiatives occur as part of a broad continuum of arrangements, from social assistance for original families to kin care and institutions. Birth and foster parents of disadvantaged youngsters are rarely in full control. Children most distant from the mainstream ideals of their day suffer, and that suffering is likely to continue into their own experience of parenthood. That trajectory is never inevitable, however. Both resilience and resistance have shaped Canadians' engagement with foster children in a society dominated by capitalist, colonial, and patriarchal power.

"Fostering Nation?" breaks much new ground for those interested in social welfare, history, and the family. It offers the first comprehensive perspective on Canada's provision for marginalized youngsters from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century. Its examination of kin care, institutions, state policies, birth parents, foster parents, and foster youngsters provides ample reminder that children's welfare cannot be divorced from that of their parents and communities, and reinforces what it means when women bear disproportionate responsibility for caregiving.

Written by a pediatrician/adolescent medicine specialist and a developmental psychologist, this book is a collection of informative, nonredundant yet comprehensive studies on adolescent pregnancy and parenting. More than 200 adolescent women in an ethnically diverse sample were studied prenatally and at regular 6-month intervals for 31/2 years postpartum. Most of the teens were poor, unmarried, first-time mothers who resided within Southeast San Diego, a poor urban area approximately 10 miles north of the U.S.-Mexico border. The purpose of this book was to offer researchers, practitioners, program directors, teachers, and graduate and medical students a better understanding of teenage pregnancy and parenthood within the following domains: * adolescent prenatal care and postpartum maternal and infant health outcomes, * immediate repeat pregnancy, * adolescent mothers' parenting, * the role of the adolescent's mother in teenage mothers' parenting, and * the baby's father.