This edited collection draws together a variety of contexts of contemporary childhoods, linking thinking from Canada with spaces in the UK and Sweden. The contributors explores the discourses that shape those childhoods and how this then impacts on the way that children come to experience their everyday lives. The aim of the book is not to reflect the entirety of childhood experience but to draw off particular expertise that shine a light into partial, yet significant areas of children's lives, with the contributions engaging with a range of voices and perspectives. As a result, the collection advocates the need for childhood studies to zoom out from a predisposition to isolate the child, which has been seen as a necessary part of conceptualizing childhood. As a result, the book focuses on a 'context' for childhoods through a consideration of both structure and agency, and through this seeks to recognise the interconnected nature of the arenas within which children live their everyday lives. A range of themes are covered, including the education system, identity within the home, suicide in communities, and younger children's 'political' engagement and sense of belonging. Contextualising Childhoods will be of interest to students and scholars across a range of disciplines, including sociology, law, and education.

This volume explores how Irish children were 'constructed' by various actors including the state, youth organisations, authors and publishers in the period before and after Ireland gained independence in 1922. It examines the broad variety of ways in which the Irish child was constructed through social and cultural activities like education, sport, youth organizations, and cultural production such as literature, toys, and clothes, covering themes ranging from gender, religion and social class, to the broader politics of identity, citizenship, and nation-building. A variety of ideals and ideologies, some of them conflicting, competed to inform how children were constructed by the adults who looked on them as embodying the future of the nation. Contributors ask fundamental questions about how children were constructed as part of the idealisation of the state before its formation, and the consolidation of the state after its foundation.

This book examines the meaning of happiness in Britain today, and observes that although we face challenges such as austerity, climate change and disenchantment with politics, we continue to be interested in happiness and living well. The author illustrates how happiness is a far more contested, social process than is often portrayed by economists and psychologists, and takes issue with sociologists who often regard wellbeing and the happiness industry with suspicion, whilst neglecting one of the key features of being human - the quest for a good life. Exploring themes that question what it means to be happy and live a good life in Britain today, such as the challenges young people face making their way through education and into their first jobs; work life-balance; mid-life crises; and old age, the book presents nineteen life stories that call for a far more critical and ambitious approach to happiness research that marries the radicalism of sociology, with recent advances in psychology and economics. This book will appeal to students and academics interested in wellbeing, happiness and quality of life and also those researching areas such as the life course, work-life balance, biographies, aging and youth studies.

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.

This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license. This open access book explores how children, parents, and survivors reshaped the politics of child protection in late twentieth-century England. Activism by these groups, often manifested in small voluntary organisations, drew upon and constructed an expertise grounded in experience and emotion that supported, challenged, and subverted medical, social work, legal, and political authority. New forms of experiential and emotional expertise were manifested in politics - through consultation, voting, and lobbying - but also in the reshaping of everyday life, and in new partnerships formed between voluntary spokespeople and media. While becoming subjects of, and agents in, child protection politics over the late twentieth century, children, parents, and survivors also faced barriers to enacting change, and the book traces how long-standing structural hierarchies, particularly around gender and age, mediated and inhibited the realisation of experiential and emotional expertise.

This book examines the processes for social integration and social cohesion among young people, drawing on data collected from the International Self-Report Delinquency (ISRD) study, which covered 35 studies.This report examines case studies from 5 selected countries (France, Germany, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and the United States) to provide an in-depth comparative study. Social integration processes are defined by sociologists as the mechanisms through which a society is held together, and populations are transformed into collectivities and communities. They are understood by criminologists to be an important factor in crime prevention, and factors such as peer groups and families are strong determinants of criminal behavior. In a time when society, and particularly young people, can seem increasingly fragmented (due to new technologies, rapidly increasing migration, economic inequality, and increased individuation), the researchers in this volume seek to understand whether and how these phenomena affect young people, and how they may have an impact on the development of criminal and antisocial behavior. This work will provide a framework for researchers in criminology and criminal justice, particularly with an interest in juveniles, developmental criminology, and crime prevention, as well as related fields such as sociology, social work, and demography.

This ground-breaking book weaves together insights from the children and youth studies literature and critical development studies. Debunking the idea of childhood and youth as self-evident social categories, the author unravels how these generational constructs are (re)constituted and experienced in relational terms in development contexts spanning both the Global South and the Global North. Running through these chapters is a fundamental concern with age, gender and generation as key principles of social differentiation. This is developed in Part 1 at a theoretical level, and applied to everyday contexts, including school, work, migration and the street in Part 2. Part 3 zooms in on the generational dynamics of development by exploring how prominent development interventions (conditional cash transfers, schooling) problems (gender discrimination) and questions (the generational question of farming) shape the (gendered) experience of being young and growing up.

This book offers an empirically informed understanding of how cultural, autobiographical and absent memories of orphanhood interact and interconnect or come into being in the re-telling of a life story and construction of an identity. The volume investigates how care experienced identities are embedded within personal, social and cultural practices of remembering. The book stems from research carried out into the life (hi)stories of twelve undervalued 'historical witnesses' (Roberts, 2002) of orphanhood: women who grew up in Nazareth House children's home in Belfast, Northern Ireland, during the 1940s, 50s and 60s. Several themes are covered, including histories of care in Northern Ireland, narratives and memories, sociologies of home, and self and identity. The result is an impressive text that works to introduce readers to the complexity of memory for care experienced people and what this means for their life story and identity.

This book discusses and analyses the ways in which fatherhood is in transition in contemporary and globalized society. The authors identify and examine fathering practices in relation to hegemonic and marginal patterns of masculinity, the concept of heteronormativity and sexuality, and patterns of segregation, class and national differences. Contextualised in relation to theories of fatherhood and relevant statistics, Fatherhood in Transition presents rich empirical material gathered in a number of western countries. It focuses on key themes including transnational fathering and families, gay fathers and the virtual global arena of fatherhood images found on the internet. Containing a number of new discussions about masculinity and fatherhood, whilst contributing to and developing existing debates and theories about men, masculinity, gender and society, this book will be of interest to students and scholars across a range of disciplines, including Men's Studies, Gender Studies, Sociology, Psychology, Media Studies and Cultural Studies.

This book provides a unique perspective on addressing issues of various forms of violence against children from scholars within their own country. Bringing together cross-disciplinary expertise, this volume addresses a vast range of topics related to child abuse and neglect in Uganda. Exploring areas from the protection of street children to cultural proverbs related to child maltreatment, this volume examines issues both specific to the Ugandan contexts as well as broadly experienced in child maltreatment work in non-Euro-American countries. This book surveys the breadth of the child protection field, covering issues of children's universal rights, challenges of protection and ethical quandaries in researching and addressing maltreatment.

In this volume, the work of British psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott is set in conversation with some of today's most talented psychodynamically-sensitive political thinkers. The editors and contributors demonstrate that Winnicott's thought contains underappreciated political insights, discoverable in his reflections on the nature of the maturational process, and useful in working through difficult impasses confronting contemporary political theorists. Specifically, Winnicott's psychoanalytic theory and practice offer a framework by which the political subject, destabilized and disrupted in much postmodern and contemporary thinking, may be recentered. Each chapter in this volume, in its own way, grapples with this central theme: the potential for authentic subjectivity and inter-subjectivity to arise within a nexus of autonomy and dependence, aggression and civility, destructiveness and care. This volume is unique in its contribution to the growing field of object-relations-oriented political and social theory. It will be of interest to political scientists, psychologists, and scholars of related subjects in the humanities and social sciences.

This book provides a sociological examination of young people's pathways into, and out of, substance abuse. Drawing from in-depth, life-history interviews with over sixty young people who have experienced problematic drug use, the author uses participants' narratives to throw light on the relationship between trauma and issues such as homelessness, crime and self-injury. Contesting the view that substance abuse is either a medical issue or individual failing, the book examines the wide variety of factors which lead to youth substance abuse such as extreme poverty and other structural factors. Whilst it does not overlook individual agency, the rich descriptions from young people's oral histories show us that the contexts in which agency was exercised, was often considerably constrained by significant structural forces. The sociological concept of 'situated choice', which is used to explain and understand how people make choices within their individual context, is used throughout the book as we witness young people wrestling to escape intergenerational disadvantage. The book will be of interest to scholars and students of Social Work, Social Policy, Youth Studies, Sociology and Health Studies.

This book provides an up-to-date and comprehensive review and critique of the scientific evidence concerning the prevalence, nature and potential effects of food advertising and other forms of marketing on children. There is growing international concern about the prevalence of childhood obesity and associated health problems. Poor quality diet and nutrition has been blamed. The food and soft drinks industries have been targeted in this context for their promotions of foods and drinks that are high in salt, sugar and fat content. Many of the most widely promoted and consumed food brands fail to meet recommended nutritional standards. What is the evidence for the effects of food promotions on children's food preferences, diets and health? This book draws on evidence from around the world, reviewing the major studies before presenting a fresh assessment of the state of play. It considers also the issue of food regulation and advertising codes of practices, the need for better and relevant consumer education and socialisation about advertising and nutrition.

This book is an ethnography of teachers and children in grades 1 and 2, and presents arguments about why we should take gender and childhood sexuality seriously in the early years of South African primary schooling. Taking issue with dominant discourses which assumes children's lack of agency, the book questions the epistemological foundations of childhood discourses that produce innocence. It examines the paradox between teachers' dominant narratives of childhood innocence and children's own conceptualisation of gender and sexuality inside the classroom, with peers, in heterosexual games, in the playground and through boyfriend-girlfriend relationships. It examines the nuances and finely situated experiences which draw attention to hegemonic masculinity and femininity where boys and girls challenge and contest relations of power. The book focuses on the early makings of gender and sexual harassment and shows how violent gender relations are manifest even amongst very young boys and girls. Attention is given to the interconnections with race, class, structural inequalities, as well as the actions of boys and girls as navigate gender and sexuality at school. The book argues that the early years of primary schooling are a key site for the production and reproduction of gender and sexuality. Gender reform strategies are vital in this sector of schooling.

This book explores the treatment, administration, and experience of children and young people certified as insane in England during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It uses a range of sources from Victorian institutions to explore regional differences, rural and urban comparisons, and categories of mental illness and mental disability. The discussion of diverse pathways in and out of the asylum offers an opportunity to reassess nineteenth-century child mental impairment in a broad social-cultural context, and its conclusions widen the parameters of a 'mixed economy of care' by introducing multiple sites of treatment and confinement. Through its expansive scope the analysis intersects with topics such as the history of childhood, institutional culture, urbanisation, regional economic development, welfare history, and philanthropy.

This book uses the example of a partnership journey between universities, schools, the local health industry as well as a number of government organisations which worked to ensure the growth of physical education in primary education. The initiative employed the United Nations (UN) ideals as a model and contextualised them within local schools and communities. What began as a pathway seed quickly grew to involve multi-stakeholder partnerships and therefore explores how the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) may be implemented at a grass roots level.

During the early 1980s, large parts of Europe were swept with riots and youth revolts. Radicalised young people occupied buildings and clashed with the police in cities such as Zurich, Berlin and Amsterdam, while in Great Britain and France, 'migrant' youths protested fiercely against their underprivileged position and police brutality. Was there a link between the youth revolts in different European cities, and if so, how were they connected and how did they influence each other? These questions are central in this volume. This book covers case studies from countries in both Eastern and Western Europe and focuses not only on political movements such as squatting, but also on political subcultures such as punk, as well as the interaction between them. In doing so, it is the first historical collection with a transnational and interdisciplinary perspective on youth, youth revolts and social movements in the 1980s.

Unterrichtsplaner gingen lange davon aus, dass Schuler kaum eigene Vorstellungen in den Unterricht mitbringen. Fachdidaktische Erhebungen zeigen allerdings, dass Kinder und Jugendliche sehr wohl eigene Ideen zu Natur und Alltag haben. Chemiedidaktiker ermoglichen erfolgreiches Lernen, indem sie diese diagnostizieren. Anhand eigener Tests oder Interviews konnen sie Fehlvorstellungen ihrer Schuler ermitteln und erforderliche Korrekturen vornehmen. "

This edited collection shows that good parenthood is neither fixed nor stable. The contributors show how parenthood is equally done by men, women and children, in and through practices involving different normative guidelines. The book explores how normative layers of parenthood are constituted by notions such as good childhood, family ideals, national public health and educational strategies. The authors illustrate how different versions of parenthood coexist and how complex sets of actions are demanded to fulfil today's expectations of parenthood in Western societies. This interdisciplinary book will be of interest to research scholars in child and family studies, students, experts, social workers, politicians, teachers and parents.

This book presents an international research-based framework that has empowered parents of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) to become critical decision makers to actively guide their child's learning and self-advocacy. Parents can use this framework to identify their child's vision and dreams, and to work with educators and service providers to establish specific learning goals and to implement effective interventions and programs that enable their child to achieve those goals and realise their vision for the future. The book begins by reviewing available research on evidence-based practice for children with ASD and outlining the Cycle of Learning decision-making framework for parents and professionals. Throughout the remainder of the book, case studies are presented to illustrate the ways in which different parents have successfully utilised this framework to develop effective plans for their child and to advocate for learning and education programs for both their child and other children with ASD in school and community settings. In addition, it highlights concrete examples of how parents have used the framework to empower their children with ASD to develop their self-awareness and self-determination, and to be able to self-advocate as they move through adolescence and into adult life.

In Negotiating Opportunities, Jessica McCrory Calarco argues that the middle class has a negotiated advantage in school. Drawing on five years of ethnographic fieldwork, Calarco traces that negotiated advantage from its origins at home to its consequences at school. Through their parents' coaching, working-class students learn to follow rules and work through problems independently. Middle-class students learn to challenge rules and request assistance, accommodations, and attention in excess of what is fair or required. Teachers typically grant those requests, creating advantages for middle-class students. Calarco concludes with recommendations, advocating against deficit-oriented programs that teach middle-class behaviors to working-class students. Those programs ignore the value of working-class students' resourcefulness, respect, and responsibility, and they do little to prevent middle-class families from finding new opportunities to negotiate advantages in school.

This book describes the findings of a five-year journey of inquiry of medical and social scientists. Of particular interest and emphasis are issues of gender, poverty, Aboriginal status, and cultural factors that frame the lives of "typical" and "non-typical" young children and their families in urban, rural and remote communities.

Juvenile Offenders and Guns explores how and why twenty-five incarcerated young men of color acquired and used guns, and how guns made them feel. Guns have multiple meanings and serve many purposes for these youth as they attempt to construct a capable masculinity in their worlds, growing up in homes where money is often scarce and fathers absent.

On April 20, 1999, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold killed twelve fellow students and one teacher at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. Two of the victims of the Columbine massacre, Cassie Bernall and Rachel Scott, reportedly were asked by the gunmen if they believed in God. Both supposedly answered 'Yes' and were killed. Within days of their death, Cassie and Rachel were being hailed as modern-day martyrs and are seen by many American evangelicals as the sparks of a religious revival among teenagers. Cassie and Rachel, as innocents martyred for faith, also became useful symbols for those seeking to advance a conservative political agenda and to lay the blame for Columbine at the feet of their liberal opponents. According to police investigators, however, Cassie and Rachel may never have been asked by their killers about God. They may have been simply victims of a senseless crime rather than martyrs to a cause. The Martyrs of Columbine provides a careful examination of the available evidence and attempts to discover what really occurred. Despite these questions the martyr-stories continued to be told and the religious and political use of Cassie and Rachel continues. The popular significance of the martyrs of Columbine persists, and may even be growing. How and why is this happening? The Martyrs of Columbine is a groundbreaking investigation of what this tragedy has come and will come to mean in American religion, politics, and culture.

This text collates and examines the jurisprudence that currently exists in respect of blood-tied genetic connection, arguing that the right to identity often rests upon the ability to identify biological ancestors, which in turn requires an absence of adult-centric veto norms. It looks firstly to the nature and purpose of the blood-tie as a unique item of birthright heritage, whose socio-cultural value perhaps lies mainly in preventing, or perhaps engendering, a feared or revered sense of 'otherness.' It then traces the evolution of the various policies on 'telling' and accessing truth, tying these to the diverse body of psychological theories on the need for unbroken attachments and the harms of being origin deprived. The 'law' of the blood-tie comprises of several overlapping and sometimes conflicting strands: the international law provisions and UNCRC Country Reports on the child's right to identity, recent Strasbourg case law, and domestic case law from a number of jurisdictions on issues such as legal parentage, vetoes on post-adoption contact, court-delegated decision-making, overturned placements and the best interests of the relinquished child. The text also suggests a means of preventing the discriminatory effects of denied ancestry, calling upon domestic jurists, legislators, policy-makers and parents to be mindful of the long-term effects of genetic 'kinlessness' upon origin deprived persons, especially where they have been tasked with protecting this vulnerable section of the population.