Showing titles in Children's Studies

Just when you think things can't get worse. They do. Then what do you do? There are some things, you just cannot ignore. Or can you?

Diane Ravitch, America's foremost historian of education, says that public education in the United States is one of the pillars of our democratic society. In this eloquent book, she explains that our public schools have been wrongly criticized for low achievement, when federal data show that test scores and graduation rates are at their highest point in history - for black students, Hispanic students, white students, and Asian students - and dropout rates are at their lowest point in history.

Broken down by a variety of subject matter, each section begins with a selection from an interview between NBA star Etan Thomas and political sportswriter Dave Zirin, followed by a Thomas poem and the writings of talented young poets.

Jonathan Kozol's books have become touchstones of the American conscience. Unlike his previous books, however, Ordinary Resurrections is almost entirely narrative and takes us into the fascinating details of daily life as he has lived it with young children who befriended him over the course of several years. Like Amazing Grace, this book describes the children of New York's South Bronx, but it is a markedly different book in mood and vantage point.

Attracting tens of thousands of men and women hoping to strike it rich, the Klondike gold rush brought with it a frenzy of activity unlike anything the world had ever seen. The few children who lived in Dawson City and its surrounding mining camps had front-row seats to this treasure hunt of the century - and to all the antics that a lust for gold brought with it. In this, her companion book to the best-selling Women of the Klondike, Frances Backhouse explores the experiences of the children who followed their parents north in search of fortune or were born in the goldfields.

The Invention of Childhood explores how gender, geography and ethnicity has impacted the development of children throughout the ages. Beginning from the year 1000, Cunningham studies the many important events in history for our children, ranging from Britain's earliest child-care guru in the Middle Ages to the first ever Foundling Hospital in the 18th Century. This hugely enjoyable piece of teaching that delves into the idea of how childhood has been constantly reinvented through the centuries, and why the role of children in society continues to obsess us today.

Every year, more than 3.5 million children under age 15 require medical treatment for sports injuries, nearly half of which are the result of simple overuse. Journalist Mark Hyman investigates the evolution of youth sports from mere games to full-on quests to turn children into tomorrow's superstar athletes by pushing them beyond physical and emotional limits. Opening up a crucial discussion about the perils of youth-sports culture today, Hyman offers the solutions and answers we need.

A companion to the acclaimed film Bully, this audiobook brings the story of the documentary beyond the closing credits, continuing the national conversation inspired by the film. Personal anecdotes from prominent antibullying activists and celebrities alongside essays from renowned experts, authors, government officials, and educators offer powerful insights, resources, and concrete steps to combat the bullying epidemic. An essential part of any campaign to decrease bullying and increase empathy, the audiobook also follows the stories of the families featured in the film beyond the big screen.

Cuando el hijo del autor le dijo sin pensar "He descubrido" a la edad de tres años, se quedó tan maravillado por la forma en que instintivamente había conjugado el verbo que pensó, si los niños a esta edad saben tanto, ¿por qué la escuela solo aspira a que llenen páginas y más páginas con letras del alfabeto desde los seis años? Este audiolibro reflexiona acerca de la necesidad de ver a los niños como seres con talento que merecen tener su propio espacio en la sociedad, en vez de construir ciudades que giran la espalda a algo tan esencial como su libertad.

By official count, more than one out of every six American children live beneath the poverty line. But statistics alone tell little of the story. In Invisible Americans, Jeff Madrick brings to light the often invisible reality and irreparable damage of child poverty in America. Keeping his focus on the children, he examines the roots of the problem, including the toothless remnants of our social welfare system, entrenched racism, and a government unmotivated to help the most voiceless citizens.

What are you going to do for the rest of your life? For David Lawrence, Jr., a brilliant newspaper editor and publisher with a distinguished, three-decade-long journalism career who retired in 1999 at the age of 56, the answer in his words was to dedicate his life to a "[N]ewly energized purposefulness: that every child have a real chance to succeed."

In The Invisible Toolbox, Kim shares with parents the single most important thing they can do to foster their child's future-learning potential and nurture the parent-child bond that is the foundation for a child's motivation to learn. She is convinced that the simple act of reading aloud has a far-reaching impact that few of us fully understand and that the importance of that act has recently been further occluded by our nearly universal saturation in technology.

Fleeing East from Nazi terror, over a million Polish Jews traversed the Soviet Union, many finding refuge in Muslim lands. Their story - the extraordinary saga of two thirds of Polish Jewish survivors - has never been fully told. Author Mikhal Dekel's father, Hannan Teitel, and her aunt Regina were two of these refugees. After they fled the town in eastern Poland where their family had been successful brewers for centuries, they endured extreme suffering in the Soviet forced labor camps known as "special settlements".

This book will give you a head's up on all the defining moments you are guaranteed to experience as a parent. It'll warn you when your life is going to take a change of course and how your child is going to influence the choices you make, and it’ll give you some practical, knowing, sanity-saving methods of dealing with them. Each moment is headlined with a common scenario that dads have encountered down through generations - but that will still come as a shock to you for the first time.

For American children raised exclusively in wartime - that is, a Cold War containing monolithic communism turned hot in the jungles of Southeast Asia - and the first to grow up with televised combat, Vietnam was predominately a mediated experience. Walter Cronkite was the voice of the conflict, and grim, nightly statistics the most recognizable feature. But as involvement grew, Vietnam affected numerous changes in child life, comparable to the childhood impact of previous conflicts - chiefly the Civil War and World War II - whose intensity and duration also dominated American culture.

Heather Shumaker has sparked much discussion with her "renegade rules for raising competent and compassionate kids". In this follow-up book, she takes on new hot-button issues like banning homework, technology use, and skipping kindergarten. Shumaker offers broader guidance on how parents can control their own anger and move from an overscheduled life to one of more free play.

Most parents want to help their children develop critical thinking skills in order to understand truth and avoid being deceived. Yet this desire doesn’t help someone learn how to actually make it happen. How can parents—how can you—actually raise a critical thinker? Sometimes the best way to learn a truth is to explore its antithesis. Just as darkness helps us better comprehend light, perhaps we can better understand how to raise critical thinkers by considering how we might do the opposite.

El continente asiático ha vivido en los últimos años la mayor, más rápida y exitosa transformación de la humanidad, sacando de la pobreza a cientos de millones de personas y mostrando al mundo que la miseria puede dejarse atrás. «Hijos del monzón» es la historia de quienes no han logrado subirse al tren de las oportunidades y que han sido a menudo aplastados por un modelo de sociedad que les ha hurtado la voz. Los niños, a pesar de las dificultades, mantienen el coraje y la dignidad.

Desde hace décadas, miles de niños, niñas y jóvenes han participado directamente en el conflicto armado colombiano como combatientes. Aunque esta es una realidad indiscutible, aún tenemos muy poca conciencia de sus implicaciones tanto para los individuos que han tomado parte directamente en ella, como para la vida en sociedad. Este libro es particularmente importante en este sentido.

You need to hear the bad news first: the results of STEM outreach to girls haven’t improved in twenty years. The good news? This book will tell you why, and how to fix it. Currently, dated narratives push girls away in fear, and blind spots result in missed opportunities to pull them in. While efforts to increase diversity in science and mathematics have succeeded, outreach has largely ignored engineering—where there is still only one woman for every five men. This is especially troubling because engineering offers vastly more jobs than other STEM fields.