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This chapter focuses on the Committee on Child Welfare and Parent Education established by the National Research Council (NRC) Division of Anthropology and Psychology. The committee remained unfunded and almost totally inactive during its first four years, until the time Robert Woodworth, an eminent Columbia University psychologist, became chair of the NRC Division of Anthropology and Psychology. Although he did not himself engage in research on children, he strongly endorsed it; one of his first activities as division chair was to ask 1200 social scientists if they studied children, in which only 124 answered in the affirmative. A first step in disassociating the committee from welfare activities was to rename it the Committee on Child Development. A conference in 1925 confirmed the need for the committee and determined its functions.

This chapter reviews the history of child care policy in the United States. In 1970, the White House Conference on Children identified affordable, reliable, comprehensive, and good quality child care programs as a pressing need of American families and children. The Comprehensive Child Development Act (CCDA)—passed by Congress in 1971 but later vetoed by President Nixon—would have created a voluntary, universally available system of child care in the United States. Tragically, the nation came tantalizingly close to a solution but fell short at the last moment.

The Child Development-Community Policing program (CDCP) is an innovative collaboration between police and child mental health professionals that aims to co-ordinate clinical approaches to intervention for children exposed to or involved in violence with police activities that contain the external sources of danger in the child's world. This chapter describes the theory and practice of CDCP and the impact of this unusual interdisciplinary partnership on the delivery of policing, mental health, and other social services for children and families exposed to violence and trauma.

During the 1920s, there were seven major child development institutes supported by philanthropy that made important contributions to the new field of child development. Of these seven, only one, the Iowa Child Welfare Research Station, has received book-length attention, and the history of only one other, the Berkeley Institute of Human Relations, has been traced in a scholarly article. Of the remaining five, the Yale Clinic of Child Development, directed by Arnold Gesell, most urgently demands attention and is the focus of the current chapter. The Yale Clinic began as the one-room Yale Juvenile Psycho-Clinic that Gesell founded in 1911. The high praise bestowed on Gesell's Mental Growth of the Preschool Child convinced the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial (LSRM) to sponsor the psycho-clinic as a major child development institute in 1926. Renamed the Yale Clinic of Child Development in 1930, it continued under Gesell's direction until he reached Yale's mandatory retirement age in 1948.

This chapter provides a review of the childcare policy framework and evaluates current policy directions. It then presents research evidence on the benefits of formal childcare services for child development. The trends in childcare are also described. The Effective Provision of Pre-school Education (EPPE) study showed a complex interaction between quantity and quality of care, but quality remained key to the production of good outcomes, especially maintaining them over the primary school period. It is significant to have some formal childcare experience up to age three on positive cognitive outcomes at ages three and age five. The analysis of the EPPE, National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) and Millennium Cohort Survey (MCS) longitudinal population surveys illustrates that the case for formal early years care producing positive child development outcomes is incontrovertible, especially if it is high quality care provided in group settings.

In writings aimed at the general public, claims that a behavior found in US residents is rooted in evolution and the brain are regularly used to set aside the need to replicate a study in diverse cultural settings. As animal experiments once represented the gold standard, enabling researchers to ignore cross-cultural evidence on child development, so advances in evolutionary biology and neuroscience have now taken that transcendent place. If development is largely a matter of human evolution and the brain, why should we worry about childhood environments in the non-Western world? “Challenging Developmental Doctrines” answers this question by examining the long history of the anthropology of child development and the emergence of cultural psychological investigations of the study of the child as emerging within, rather than apart from, cultural context. Critically engaging with the work of Stanley Hall, Jean Piaget, Lawrence Kohlberg, and Margaret Mead, among others, LeVine shows how John and Beatrice Whitings’ research group at Harvard and a subsequent long-term study of child development among the Hausa of Northwest Nigeria helped to show how and why culture is important in the study of developmental psychology.

This chapter argues that questions of culture (identified as one of ten major principles affecting human development) have been seriously neglected in traditional child development research, often based on samples from very particular cultural contexts. There are methodological and ethical complexities in researching the everyday settings and practices of child development across cultures as well as between different groups within particular cultures. However culture is crucial in helping to shape the meanings of children’s everyday lives and thus in framing what comes to constitute ‘trouble’, which has to be understood with reference to community expectations of what is considered desirable. At the same time, the chapter warns of the dual dangers of confusing culture with troubles as well as mistaking troubles for culture. In seeking to unravel some of these difficult conundrums, guidance is offered under the general approach of cultural pluralism while caution is urged in making judgements about what constitutes ‘family troubles’ in variable cultural contexts.

This chapter provides an overview of attachment theory as it relates to child flourishing in the elementary school classroom. It describes the implementation and results of the Child Development Project (CDP), a multiyear research and development project that applied attachment theory, along with constructivist, care, and self-determination theories, to the elementary classroom. The chapter provides detailed illustrations of the CDP program in one high-poverty classroom, as well as its use in a teacher education program, and the potential for and evidence of long-term effects on child flourishing in middle and high school follow-ups are discussed.

Chapter Two illustrates that the dual predominance of a) pyschological perspectives on father salience to child development and b) sociological perspectives on ‘fatherlessness’ in the USA represented distinct, prominent and paradigmatic features of the American literature. Chapter two charts the ‘invention’ of the cost recovery model of child support by the US welfare regime in 1974, as the template within the English-speaking welfare regimes. In addition, Chapter Two also explains that neo-patriarchal perspectives on fatherhood amplified and flourished under the American neo-liberal and neo-conservative paradigm of combining welfare ‘reform’ with the promotion of marriage under the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA, 1996).

This chapter looks at segregationists’ opposition to the Child Development Group of Mississippi (CDGM). Segregationists opposed the civil rights-affiliated Head Start program because of the greater financial independence and self-determination that it provided to black Mississippians. When segregationists’ efforts to end CDGM failed, they worked to take control of War on Poverty funds by setting up rival programs. U.S. Senator John Stennis (D-MS) led the opposition and received assistance from the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission.

This chapter looks at what can be said about the kinds of associations between childhood factors and adult earnings, by drawing on the data from two British birth cohorts were born sometime in March 1958 and in April 1970. These data sources are unique, in the sense that they followed the cohort members from birth, throughout the childhood years, and into adulthood. A short discussion of estimates on the extent of intergenerational mobility based on data from the two cohorts is provided first. This is followed by a summary of the earlier findings about the connections between childhood factors and adult outcomes. The next section tries to determine any evidence of an intergenerational spillover. The chapter ends with a BCS70 comparison with the National Child Development Study, while focusing on the associations with child poverty.

Black women made up the overwhelming majority of the Child Development Group of Mississippi’s (CDGM) personnel and Chapter Three chronicles their employment experiences. Marian Wright Edelman sat on CDGM’s board and Lillie Ayers, Winson Hudson, and Alice Giles served as teachers. Head Start afforded working-class black women the opportunity to return to school and complete their education. It also gave them leadership experiences and the chance to more openly participate in civil rights since local whites could no longer use the threat of job termination to control their political activity.

This chapter bridges work from developmental psychology and criminology. In it, we outline the reasoning behind our choice of developmental factors to explore in detail as potential causes of violence. To do so, we bring to the fore constructs from the field of developmental psychology which may be unfamiliar to criminologists, some of which have not been linked explicitly to violence in the child development literature, either. Constructs such as child effects, human sociability, theory of mind, average expectable environment, sensitive periods, negative emotionality, emotion understanding, emotion regulation and social information processing are introduced and applied in service of explaining why we chose to write chapters on intelligence and executive functioning, academic achievement and other school factors, attachment, parental warmth/rejection, and maltreatment.

Chapter Two explores how the Child Development Group of Mississippi (CDGM) Head Start program became an integral part of Mississippi’s civil rights movement from 1965 to 1968. The early childhood education program provided employment opportunities for black activists who lost their jobs because of their political activity or because of their relationship with activists. Pap Hamer, the husband of Fannie Lou Hamer, and Roxie Meredith, the mother of James Meredith, secured Head Start employment after suffering reprisals because of their connection to the civil rights movement. CDGM replicated the curriculum of the 1964 freedom schools, emphasizing black history and social justice in the classroom. The chapter demonstrates how War on Poverty programs furthered civil rights in southern communities.

Chapter ten compares the threats to sustainability of social environments identified in the prior chapter with the existential threat of climate change. The author calls for a similar transformation of macrosystemic that shapes out social and political worlds. She proposes adopting ecogenerism, which treats the welfare of future generations as a its paramount vale, as the agent of transformation. To guide in defining children’s essential needs and rights, and to measure progress in creating a wordl fit for children, the author proposes the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) as the most broadly accepted normative framework. The author introduces the rights protected by the CRC, first in child-friendly language and then using the more complex language and interpretive tools of human rights law. The author highlights various innovative CRC principles that can change play a role in transforming the ecology of childhood. They include: viewing the best interest of the child holistically as protecting the full range of children’s rights; bridging the public/private divide by clarifying children’s positive rights to social welfare supports; and integrating the science of child development into the scheme of human rights.

Holmes County residents put pressure on the school district through petitions and meetings to follow federal law and desegregate schools. Children were physically attacked by students and teachers. Bus drivers did nothing to stop the verbal abuse and physical violence. Local organizers filed affidavits with Movement lawyers Marian Wright and Henry Aronson. The local whites set up their own private schools, often stealing furniture, supplies, and equipment from the public schools. More black students in Holmes County enrolled in white schools than any other Mississippi county. The Child Development Group of Mississippi drew down federal money to open Head Start programs in Holmes County. Josephine Disparti, the nurse who ran the medical clinic and programs at the HCCC left after disagreements with the Medical Committee for Human Rights. A description is given of children playing in the road, trying to outrun the pesticide truck.

This chapter recounts how segregationists’ political pressure led Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) Director Sargent Shriver to back away from the Child Development Group of Mississippi (CDGM) and support a rival Head Start program, Mississippi Action for Progress (MAP). In funding MAP, Shriver preserved Head Start in Mississippi and appeased powerful political leaders. Shriver won the support of key black and white leaders in Mississippi including National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) President Aaron Henry and Greenville newspaper publisher Hodding Carter III. CDGM parents and staff, however, refused to accept MAP. Their resistance demonstrated CDGM’s empowering nature.

The passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, along with the Johnson administration’s War on Poverty, affected the way Fannie Lou Hamer delivered her speeches. In the late 1960s, Hamer discarded personal narratives, in which she highlighted the cruelties and violence of Mississippi’s white supremacist culture, in favor of new rhetorical strategies and tactics for bureaucratic and electoral ends. In early 1967, Hamer spoke at a chapter meeting of the National Council of Negro Women in Mississippi. This chapter reproduces Hamer’s speech, in which she continues to criticize the educated middle-class blacks’ alliances with “chicken-eating” black ministers and white power brokers. Hamer specifically attacked the Sunflower County Progress Inc., a coalition of moderate blacks and whites that sought to attract Head Start monies from the federal government and would compete directly with the Child Development Group of Mississippi, with whom Hamer was aligned.