A groundbreaking study of the impact of current events on the lives and minds of children from the Pulitzer Prize-winning child psychiatrist. Most parents teach their children the lessons and skills they need to function in the world while trying to shield them from the harsher realities of life. But long before children are considered ready to face the complications of the real world, they are learning truths and perspectives most adults imagine are beyond them. Child psychiatrist and author of The Spiritual Life of Children, Robert Coles traveled the globe for more than a decade, from Northern Ireland to Nicaragua, South Africa to Southeast Asia, across the United States and beyond, conducting in-depth interviews with children about their cultures, ideologies, national pride, and political knowledge. He learned that the greater challenges, traumas, conflicts, and issues of the world around them find their way into children’s impressionable minds and play a crucial role in their development. Robert Coles’ unique and groundbreaking research sheds much-needed light on the psychology of childhood, revolutionizing both professional and personal understanding of humans’ formative years. “Robert Coles is to the stories that children have to tell what Homer was to the tale of the Trojan War.” —The New York Times Book Review

Based on a study of 12,000 elementary school children in eight large and medium-sized American cities, this book presents the first large-scale study of political attitude formation in children. The authors view political development from the perspective of a general theory of socialization, and compare the influences of social class, intelligence, teacher attitude, and religious membership on the growth of political attitudes. The book outlines the way in which the child's political awareness evolvesfrom identification with authority figures such as father, policeman, the president, to a grasp of more abstract political concepts and the rudiments of political participation. Illuminating a topic of great theoretical concern and practical educational importance, the book is a significant contribution to the fields of political sociology, child development and educational psychology, and an important reference work for all concerned with the processes of socialization and of attitude formation in general. The Development of Political Attitudes in Children was based on a major survey, the first of its kind, begun at the University of Chicago in 1960 to as certain information about the induction of children into the political life of the United States, to describe the nature of socialization into citizenship roles, and to examine pre-adult political learning and behavior in terms of other implications for the stability of the political system.

A rarely discussed aspect of children's literature--the politics behind a book's creation--has been thoroughly explored in this intelligent, enlightening, and fascinating account.

This title examines the role of political culture and penal populism in the response to the emotive subject of child-on-child homicide. Green explores the reasons underlying the vastly differing responses of the English and Norwegian criminal justice systems to the cases of James Bulger and Silje Redergard respectively. Whereas James Bulger's killers were subject to extreme press and public hostility, and held in secure detention for nine months before being tried in an adversarial court, and served eight years in custody, a Redergard's killers were shielded from public antagonism and carefully reintegrated into the local community. This book argues that English adversarial political culture creates far more incentives to politicize high-profile crimes than Norwegian consensus political culture. Drawing on a wealth of empirical research, Green suggests that the tendency for politicians to justify punitive responses to crime by invoking harsh political attitudes is based upon a flawed understanding of public opinion. In a compelling study, Green proposes a more deliberative response to crime is possible by making English culture less adversarial and by making informed public judgment more assessable.

The conventional wisdom according to which children’s lives should be safe from adult concerns tends to situate them categorically outside the political. Thus understood, children become political agents when they reach maturity and eligibility to formal participation. Alternatively, political skills and competences may be seen to develop gradually through political socialization. Both views are challenged in recent scholarship on youthful politics beyond the formal, adult-centered political world. This book considers politics as it appears and unfolds in children and young people’s everyday lives. The collection problematizes several key concepts in the research field and introduces a relational reading of youthful political agency based on social, spatial and political theorization. The chapters engage with youthful realities in Sri Lanka, Palestine, Sweden, New Zealand, the US and the UK, revealing a variety of ways in which children and youth are important political actors in their own right. The book also includes an extensive literary review on the study of children and young people’s politics in the past decade. This book was originally published as a special issue of Space and Polity.

A warm, wise, and urgent guide to parenting in uncertain times, from a longtime reporter on race, reproductive health, and politics In We Live for the We, first-time mother Dani McClain sets out to understand how to raise her daughter in what she, as a black woman, knows to be an unjust -- even hostile -- society. Black women are more likely to die during pregnancy or birth than any other race; black mothers must stand before television cameras telling the world that their slain children were human beings. What, then, is the best way to keep fear at bay and raise a child so she lives with dignity and joy? McClain spoke with mothers on the frontlines of movements for social, political, and cultural change who are grappling with the same questions. Following a child's development from infancy to the teenage years, We Live for the We touches on everything from the importance of creativity to building a mutually supportive community to navigating one's relationship with power and authority. It is an essential handbook to help us imagine the society we build for the next generation.

Exploring the current and historical tensions between liberal capitalism and indigenous models of family life, Ian Kelvin Hyslop argues for a new model of child protection in Aotearoa New Zealand and other parts of the Anglophone world. He puts forward the case that child safety can only be sustainably advanced by policy initiatives which promote social and economic equality and from practice which takes meaningful account of the complex relationship between economic circumstances and the lived realities of service users.