Childhood And Other Neighborhoods

In Stuart Dybek's Chicago, wonder lurks in unexpected places—in garbage-strewn alleys, gloomy basement apartments, abandoned rooms at the top of rickety stairs periodically rumbled by passing el trains. Transformed through the wide eyes of Dybek's adolescent heroes, these grimy urban backwaters become exotic landscapes of fear-filled possibility, of dreams not yet turned to nightmares. Chronicling what happens when Old World faith meets the dark side of the American dream, Dybek's poignant stories of coming of age in Chicago alternately appall, amaze, and just simply entertain.

How we raise young children is one of today's most highly personalized and sharply politicized issues, in part because each of us can claim some level of "expertise." The debate has intensified as discoveries about our development-in the womb and in the first months and years-have reached the popular media. How can we use our burgeoning knowledge to assure the well-being of all young children, for their own sake as well as for the sake of our nation? Drawing from new findings, this book presents important conclusions about nature-versus-nurture, the impact of being born into a working family, the effect of politics on programs for children, the costs and benefits of intervention, and other issues. The committee issues a series of challenges to decision makers regarding the quality of child care, issues of racial and ethnic diversity, the integration of children's cognitive and emotional development, and more. Authoritative yet accessible, From Neurons to Neighborhoods presents the evidence about "brain wiring" and how kids learn to speak, think, and regulate their behavior. It examines the effect of the climate-family, child care, community-within which the child grows.

The stolid landscape of Chicago suddenly turns dreamlike and otherworldly in Stuart Dybek's classic story collection. A child's collection of bottle caps becomes the tombstones of a graveyard. A lowly rightfielder's inexplicable death turns him into a martyr to baseball. Strains of Chopin floating down the tenement airshaft are transformed into a mysterious anthem of loss. Combining homely detail and heartbreakingly familiar voices with grand leaps of imagination, The Coast of Chicago is a masterpiece from one of America's most highly regarded writers.

Religious Narratives in Contemporary Culture: Between Cultural Memory and Transmediality analyzes the presence and function of traces of religious narratives in contemporary western culture, from the perspective of cultural memory studies and the transmedial study of narrative and art.

The essential reference for human development theory, updated and reconceptualized The Handbook of Child Psychology and Developmental Science, a four-volume reference, is the field-defining work to which all others are compared. First published in 1946, and now in its Seventh Edition, the Handbook has long been considered the definitive guide to the field of developmental science. Volume 4: Ecological Settings and Processes in Developmental Systems is centrally concerned with the people, conditions, and events outside individuals that affect children and their development. To understand children's development it is both necessary and desirable to embrace all of these social and physical contexts. Guided by the relational developmental systems metatheory, the chapters in the volume are ordered them in a manner that begins with the near proximal contexts in which children find themselves and moving through to distal contexts that influence children in equally compelling, if less immediately manifest, ways. The volume emphasizes that the child's environment is complex, multi-dimensional, and structurally organized into interlinked contexts; children actively contribute to their development; the child and the environment are inextricably linked, and contributions of both child and environment are essential to explain or understand development. Understand the role of parents, other family members, peers, and other adults (teachers, coaches, mentors) in a child's development Discover the key neighborhood/community and institutional settings of human development Examine the role of activities, work, and media in child and adolescent development Learn about the role of medicine, law, government, war and disaster, culture, and history in contributing to the processes of human development The scholarship within this volume and, as well, across the four volumes of this edition, illustrate that developmental science is in the midst of a very exciting period. There is a paradigm shift that involves increasingly greater understanding of how to describe, explain, and optimize the course of human life for diverse individuals living within diverse contexts. This Handbook is the definitive reference for educators, policy-makers, researchers, students, and practitioners in human development, psychology, sociology, anthropology, and neuroscience.

Comprehensive and integrative, The Oxford Handbook of Poverty and Child Development describes the contextual and social ecology of children living in poverty and illuminates the biological and behavioral interactions that either promote optimal development or that place children at risk of having poor developmental outcomes.

Recent crises—whether policy-induced (e.g., family separation at the Mexico/U.S. border) or natural disaster-related (e.g., hurricanes in Florida and North Carolina and wildfires in California)—have galvanized the attention of the U.S. and international public on the plight of children who endure these traumatic events. The sheer enormity of such wrenching events tend to overshadow the trauma endured by many children whose everyday life circumstances fall short of affording them a safe, stable, and nurturing environment. At the national level, three rounds of data collection spanning January 2008 through April 2014 constituted the National Survey of Children’s Exposure to Violence (NatSCEV) that—according to Finkelhor, Turner, Shattuck, and Hambly (2013) in reporting on the 2011 round—assessed “a wide range of childhood victimizations” (pp. 614-615). Among many other findings, Finkelor et al. concluded that “overall, 57.7% of the children and youth had experienced or witnessed at least 1 to 5 aggregate exposures (assaults and bullying, sexual victimization, maltreatment by a caregiver, property victimization, or witnessing victimization) in the year before this survey” (p. 619). According to the recent re-visiting of NatSCEV II by Turner et al. (2017), “almost 1 in 4 children and adolescents ages 5-15 in the United States lived in family environments with only modest levels of safety, stability, and nurturance, while about 1 in 15 had consistently low levels across multiple domains” (p. 8). Adverse childhood events (ACEs) have both immediate and long-term impacts on children’s health and well-being (Banyard, Hambly, & Grych, 2017; Bowen, Jarrett, Stahl, Forrester, & Valmaggia, 2018; Walker & Walsh, 2015). Children do not shed their entanglement with ACEs at the schoolroom door. To highlight just one study, Jimenez, Wade, Lin, Morrow, & Reichman (2016) conducted a secondary analysis of a national urban birth cohort and found that experiencing ACEs in early childhood was “associated with below-average, teacher-reported academic and literacy skills and [more] behavior problems in kindergarten” (p. 1).