This book explains the differences between European countries in the supply and forms of public child care and preschool provisions by reference to the historical context in which these forms originated and to the institutional constraints underlying their development.

This book explores the challenge of making a life: finding meaning, livelihood and social connectedness. Drawing on research with young people, the analysis goes beyond traditional treatment of youth issues or 'problems', providing discussion of topics like young people's learning and work, their creativity, wellbeing and active citizenship.

Exploring current approaches to addressing boys' education in schools, this book highlights the limitations of structural reform initiatives and the failure to address the impact of socioeconomic status, race, sexuality, disability and hegemonic masculinity on both boys' and girls' participation in schooling.

This book demonstrates how contemporary children's texts draw on utopian and dystopian tropes in their projections of possible futures. The authors explore the ways in which children's texts respond to social change and global politics. The book argues that children's texts are crucially implicated in shaping the values of their readers.

The United Nations Convention of the Rights of the Child resulted in even greater global awareness of the significance of children's rights and perspectives. The contributors to this book explore the extent to which children's interests are finding expression in different societies in Western Europe.

This book examines common familial trends and differences throughout Europe from the 1960s onwards and discusses the most common theoretical explanations for convergence and divergence. Eriikka Oinonen reveals how structural factors such as the labour market, the welfare state and the EU affect Europeans' family related choices.

This book examines only-child experience in global perspective and offers an insight into the dilemmas and challenges only-children face as adults. Explored from both a social and psychological perspective, it reveals the complexity and multidimensional nature of the private and public worlds of the only-child.

Drawing upon qualitative material from parents and professionals, including ethnography, narrative inquiry, interviews and focus groups, this book brings together feminist and critical disability studies theories.

This book provides a disturbing account of the reality of child abuse. Based on data from 152 countries, Einar Helander considers the physical, societal, economic and judicial consequences of child abuse, proposing a universal, community-based prevention programme.

This book examines the lives and repartnering behaviour of former spouses and co-habitees, groups pivotal to recent marital change. Focusing on contemporary Britain, it examines these people's experiences of being single, their orientations towards past and new relationships, and their self-identities in the context of a couple-orientated society.

This research project offers a new perspective on post-sixteen transitions. Combing secondary data with narrative accounts it describes how young people in the UK make choices at the end of their compulsory schooling and provides a dynamic model of decision-making and a thorough critique of current research in the area, beyond fashionable concepts.

Detailing the development of a new Western attitude to children and their place in society, this book tells the story of Italy's forgotten children at the end of the nineteenth century - foundlings, street children, factory and mine workers, emigrants and delinquents - and illustrates the efforts of the recently unified Italian state to help them.

For years we have known that teenagers' peers influence their substance use. This book tells you how. It is not a simple explanation: it is based on the teenagers' own selection of peers, peer influence, the formation of social networks and the patterning of their peer ties. All of which can result in chain reactions in teenagers' substance use.

Using an innovative, action research approach, Vickers explores the lives of women who work full time while caring for a child with significant chronic illness or disability. She demonstrates that such women can be disconnected from those around them, unsupported and overwhelmed with responsibility at home and work.

Taking as its focus the erotic child in decadent aesthetics, this book explores the sexual and political stakes of an aestheticistexperience of rapture. Ohi examines the power of the work of art to transport, to disorient, to move, to extort the equivocal pleasuresof self-loss. He also explores how the beautiful child offers partisans of 'art for art's sake' an emblem for the ecstatic and erotic, even the queer possibilities of art. Aestheticism's erotic child is thus in stark contrast to the innocent child of today's ideology, who secures the claims of identity against the very disorientations celebrated by aestheticism. Articulating aesthetic transport through the desiring and desired child, aestheticism interrogates the ideology underpinning sexual oppression.

Educating young people about sex and sexuality remains one of the most controversial and political areas of the school curriculum. Drawing on young people's own understandings of their sexual selves, knowledge and practices Sexual Subjects considers the implications for how we conceptualize the effectiveness of sexuality education. Reshaping thinking around youthful (hetero)sexualities Sexual Subjects challenges current approaches to teaching about sex and sexuality.

In this timely study, high profile researchers contribute to the burgeoning field of the social studies of childhood with original and often surprising perspectives and approaches. They demonstrate that far from being esoteric or negligible, childhood is part and parcel of the social fabric in both poor and affluent countries. With chapters on children's agency in small worlds and childhood's placement in large scale relationships, the book shows not only the variety of childhood(s), but also suggests that much is common in a generational context.

Friendship and Educational Choice provides a unique insight into how young people go about making decisions about their educational options and the subtle, yet crucial, influence of friends and peers on these processes. It argues that focusing on both the impact of friends on educational decisions and the reciprocal influences that such decisions may exert on young people's friendships helps us to understand the significance and impact of educational choice in the wider lives of young people.

Written in a clear and accessible style, this book presents a broad ranging enquiry into various methodological issues associated with contemporary youth research. Chapters cover a variety of topical areas, including youth transitions, youth in care, drugs, consumption and music. Featuring studies by new and established youth researchers, this book will be an invaluable resource for undergraduate and postgraduate students, and also those carrying out more advanced research, in the fields of sociology, social policy, health studies, cultural and media studies.

This book analyzes the nature and experience of childhoods around the world at the beginning of the 21st century. Wide-ranging developments concerning children in the fields of social policy, sociology and politics have spurred significant growth in the social study of childhood. The book, which is primarily designed for students, academics and practitioners who need to keep up with fast-moving contemporary developments, considers childhood from a variety of disciplinary perspectives.

Much concern has been expressed about the scandal of physical and sexual abuse by care workers of children living in residential homes but this is the first detailed study of the major problem of violence between children . Based on extensive interviews with young people as well as staff, children's own perspectives and experiences of violence are highlighted. There is important new information about different levels of violence between homes, the significance of gender and group hierarchies, and strategies to tackle violence.

This collection of essays represents some of the most important recent research into changing patterns of family, household and community life. It brings together some of the leading sociologists in the field to explore how these informal social relationships change over time and the life course. It will be essential reading on courses concerned with the family and youth sociology.

Provides insights into a lively field of international human rights politics - the protection of children and their rights - by looking at the negotiations leading to the 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.

An incendiary examination of burnout - what got us here, the pressures that sustain it and the need for drastic change Are you tired, stressed and trying your best but somehow it's never enough? Does your job seep into your evenings and your home life creep into your work? Does the bottom half of your To Do list feel unreachable? This is burnout and it is affecting how we work, parent, socialise and live. Through her own experience, original interviews and detailed analysis, Anne Helen Petersen traces the institutional and generational causes of burnout. And, in doing so, she helps us to let go of our guilt and imagine a possible future. 'Genuinely enlightening... Can't Even is a reminder to the burned out generation that things can be different' Observer

The objective of this study is to understand the perceptions, beliefs, and influencing factors that may lead to different fertility outcomes among young women in Nicaragua, a country with one of the highest adolescent fertility rates in Latin America. The results are based on qualitative data collected in urban areas. Miriam Muller reveals that two structural constraints affect women's choices and their capacity to actively participate in defining their life paths: poverty and traditional gender norms.This book contributes to the discussion of intergenerational transmission of poverty by disentangling the mechanisms behind decision-making around teenage motherhood and by describing the consequences of these decisions.