When players play, there is a transactional process at work, whether for children on a teeter-totter or pandas playing with peers. In this edited volume, nine experts on play show how play transactions are an important dynamic of play across cultures, age groups, even species. A rich array of play contexts is evident across the nine chapters, encompassing varied continents, age groups, and sorts of players. The play processes of giant pandas, of home-visiting therapists, of Polynesian women, and of autistic kids are included here. The healthy interchange of ideas about play, one of the hallmarks of the Association for the Study of Play, is a process that is cultivated in this new volume.

Adults were once children, yet a generational gap can present itself when grown-ups seek to know children's lives, in research. In A Younger Voice discloses how qualitative research, tailored to be child-centered, can shrink the gap of generational unintelligibility. The volume invites and instructs researchers who want to explore children's vantage points as social actors. Its suggested tool kit draws from both academic and applied research, based on the author's lifelong career as a child-centered qualitative researcher. World round, research in knowing children has grown recently in anthropology, sociology, geography, economics, cultural psychology and a host of applied fields. This book draws widely from the trending child-centered research movement, taking stock of methods for fulfilling its aims. In A Younger Voice provides mature researchers with a kid-savvy guide to learning effectively about, from, and with children. The highlighted methods' are steadfastly child-attuned, "thinking smaller" in order to free children to participate with empowerment. From fieldwork and observation, to focus groups and depth interviews, to the use of photography, artwork, and metaphors, viable methods are discussed with an old-hand's acumen for making the procedures practical with children in the field. Whether an investigator is at the beginning of a project (designing from scratch procedures to involve and reveal the young) or at the final stages (conducting interpretations and analysis true to children's meanings) In A Younger Voice gives know-how for a challenging area of inquiry. Playfully interviewing children as young as five years old, as well as empowering teenagers to tell it like it is, are tasks revealed to be both doable and essential. For adults seeking to overcome generational-cultural myopia, these methods are invaluable.

For children who live with a chronic illness, each day is filled with endless treatments, painful symptoms, confusion, and embarrassment. How can an eight-year-old girl understand diabetes, let alone explain to her schoolmates why she has to leave class to have her blood tested? How can the father of a child with asthma ever sleep soundly through the night with the fear that his son may suffocate in the next room? In this book, Cindy Dell Clark tells the stories of children who suffer from two common illnesses that are often underestimated by those not directly touched by them-asthma and diabetes. She describes how play, humor, and other expressive methods, invented by the children themselves, allow families to cope with the pain. Her interviews with forty-six families give readers an understanding of how children comprehend their illnesses and how parents struggle to care for their sons and daughters while trying to give them a "normal" childhood. Chronically ill children are at a greater risk of developing mental health or social adjustment problems than their peers, and asthma has been gaining ground in both incidence and fatality in recent years. This eye-opening work emphasizes the importance of improving the lives of these children by understanding their perspectives, both imagined and real. In Sickness and in Play is part of the Rutgers Series in Childhood Studies edited by Myra Bluebond-Langner. Cindy Dell Clark is an assistant professor of human development and family studies at Pennsylvania State University, Delaware County and author of Flights of Fancy, Leaps of Faith: Children's Myths in Contemporary America.

In Flights of Fancy, Leaps of Faith, Cindy Dell Clark went right to the believers - American children - to explore how children themselves give meaning to Santa, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy. Through interviews and observation conducted in real-life settings from homes to shopping malls during the holidays, she asks whether believing in these figures is good or bad for children. Using their insights, she offers fresh, new interpretations about tooth loss as a rite of passage, about Christmas (including the role of the family and the Christmas tree), and about Easter customs (including the Easter egg hunt) in contemporary America. Clark challenges the notion that the figures are merely "imaginary". She demonstrates how children actively shape these traditions through their own creativity and beliefs. And because they require the child's faith in order to be experienced, they play an important and singular role in a child's psychological development. Through the mysteries and myths of Christmas and Easter, families balance the values of receiving and giving, of growth and sacrifice. Each aspect of the Santa myth, from his slide down a chimney to his big red suit, plays a part in a child's imagination. Through their offerings of milk and cookies and their letter writing, children bring their relationship to Santa into developing attitudes toward giving and receiving gifts. The Easter Bunny story, with its ritual egg hunt and baskets of brightly colored candy, is explored in terms of life and its possibility of growth. In these examples, Clark shows how children play an active role in constructing family rituals and cultural reality, since their willingness to make the storiestheir own helps to renew the traditions. This engaging look at our central symbols will hold great interest for parents, as well as for teachers, psychologists, and other professionals concerned with childhood culture. Complete with children's vivid testimonies and colorful illustrations, it is a revealing journey into a child's mind and world.