Bøger i Rutgers Series in Childhood Studies serien

In industrialized democracies, a broad consensus developed that children should not work, but rather learn and play in settings designed and built with these specific purposes in mind. Here, the authors extract common threads in children's understandings of their material worlds, and show how the experience of modernity varies for young people.

Today, approximately 1.6 million American children live in what social scientists call ""grandfamilies" - households in which children are being raised by their grandparents. In You've Always Been There for Me, Rachel Dunifon uses data gathered from grandfamilies in New York to analyse their unique strengths and distinct needs.

Many saw the 2008 election of Barack Obama as a sign that America had moved past the issue of race, that a colourblind society was finally within reach. But as Marianne Modica reveals in Race Among Friends, attempts to be colourblind do not end racism-in fact, ignoring race increases the likelihood that racism will occur in our schools and in society.

In the aftermath of armed conflict, how do new generations of young people learn about peace, justice, and democracy? Michelle J. Bellino describes how, following Guatemala's civil war, adolescents at four schools in urban and rural communities learn about their country's history of authoritarianism and develop civic identities within a fragile postwar democracy.

Explores the issues that arise from a mother's confinement and provides first-person accounts of the experiences of children with moms behind bars. The author offers a perspective that recognises differences over the long course of a family's interaction with the criminal justice system and presents an unparalleled view into the children's lives both before and after their mothers are imprisoned.

In an adult-dominated society, teenagers are often shut out of participation in politics. This title offers an account of young people's attempts to get involved in community politics, and documents the battles waged to form youth movements and create social change in schools and neighborhoods.

Shows the social world of inner city African American girls and how they manage threats of personal violence. This title presents an account of how African American girls negotiate schools and neighborhoods governed by the so-called 'code of the street' - the form of street justice that governs violence in distressed urban areas.

Increasingly, educational researchers and policy-makers are finding that extracurricular programmes make a major difference in the lives of disadvantaged youth. Why Afterschool Matters closely follows ten Mexican American students who attended the same extracurricular programme in California, then chronicles its long-term effects on their lives, from eighth grade to early adulthood.

In Zambia, due to the rise of TB and the connected HIV epidemic, a large number of children have experienced the illness or death of at least one parent. This study examines how well intentioned practitioners fail to realise that children take on active caregiving roles when their guardians become seriously ill and demonstrates why understanding children's care is crucial for global health policy.

Explores how ex-combatants and other post-war youth negotiated a depleted and difficult social and cultural landscape in the years following Liberia's fourteen-year bloody civil war. Unlike others who study child soldiers, Abby Hardgrove's ethnography looks at both former combatants and also the youth who were not recruited to fight.

Focuses on the lives of sixty-five drug-using girls in the juvenile justice system who grew up in families characterized by parental drug use, violence, and child maltreatment. Vera Lopez situates girls' relationships with parents who fail to live up to parenting norms and examines how these relationships change over time and contribute to the girls' drug use and involvement in the justice system.

Cosmopolitanism - the genuine appreciation of cultural and racial diversity - is often associated with adult worldliness and sophistication. Yet, as this innovative new book suggests, children growing up in multicultural environments might be the most cosmopolitan group of all.

From the early twentieth century to the present day, countless books and films have portrayed the solitary exploration of urban spaces as a source of empowerment and delight for children. Fantasies of Neglect explains how this trope of the self-sufficient, mobile urban child originated and considers why it persists, even as it goes against the grain of social reality.

Drawing from ethnographic data and research in immigrant communities, this study provides the definition of child labor by assessing children's roles as translators as part of a cost equation in an era of global restructuring and considers how sociocultural learning and development is shaped as a result of children's contributions as translators.

Follows a group of young girls living on Nevis, an island society in the Eastern Caribbean. This title shows that girls are often caught between conflicting discourses of Christian teachings about chastity, public health cautions about safe sex, and media enticements about consumer delights.

A provocative work that will prompt a thorough reevaluation of the culture of secondary education, Defining Student Success shows how different schools, promoting modified versions of larger cultural ideas of success, foster distinct understandings of what it takes to succeed--understandings that do more to reproduce a socioeconomic status quo than to promote upward mobility.