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This chapter examines the intellectual background and origins of the Yale Longitudinal Study (YLS). It begins with the establishment in 1911 of the Yale Psycho-Clinic for children at the Yale School of Medicine, headed by Arnold Gesell and devoted to the study and care of children with intellectual and mental disabilities. It then considers the role played by Milton Senn, who brought psychoanalysis to what would become the Yale Child Study Center. It also looks at other individuals who were part of the group that initiated the YLS, including Albert Solnit, Samuel Ritvo, Sally Provence, and Seymour Lustman. Finally, it describes the years after the YLS was undertaken, with particular reference to its impact on child psychoanalysis, adult analysis, child development, and child mental health in America.

This chapter explores how Golden Age authors partnered with children in storyteller-auditor collaboration and represented those partnerships in their fictions. Moving from translations of the Grimms’ fairy tales to popular story collections by Mary Molesworth, Mary Cowden Clarke, and Margaret Gatty, the chapter reveals how storytelling scenes—both real gatherings that inspired these authors and fictional and illustrated moments of narration in their texts—were enriched by intergenerational collaboration based on active listening and critical response and provided opportunities for child agency. These creative partnerships are best read alongside shifting understandings of the relationship between children and language, and therefore the chapter traces theories of children’s language acquisition from the late eighteenth to early twentieth centuries, from Rousseau’s Émile to establishment of the field of Child Study at the fin-de-siècle.

There are critical times in a child's life where failure to intervene can have irreversible impacts on their capabilities and quality of life. Although protecting the rights of all children and reducing inequities in human development are acknowledged needs, strong evidence on how to do so is sparse. It is against this backdrop that the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) initiated, in 2007, the Global Study on Child Poverty and Disparities. This Study now spans 50+ countries in Africa, Asia, CEE/CIS, Latin America and the Middle East. This chapter describes the progress made by this coordinated international effort to highlight the nature and extent of multidimensional child poverty, and explores concrete strategies on how national policies can address poverty and disparities. The analysis looks at why UNICEF launched this effort; what concerns, considerations and principles have shaped it; and analyses the challenges of operationalizing child poverty concepts, measures and responses across five continents. Finally, it examines what lessons this global effort can offer to the international development community and provides recommendations on the way forward.

This chapter considers how the conditions of production and dissemination of children's literature changed beginning in the mid-1930s, and looks at the particular ways that leftists, in response to these changes, began to reshape the field and its output in the years prior to the onset of the Cold War. Beginning in the mid-1930s, especially thanks to a Popular Front effort to broaden left-wing influence in American life, members of the Communist milieu began to write children's books that were geared toward a wide audience. This effort intersected with a growing sense among librarians, teachers, and other established members of the children's literature field (including the influential Child Study Association) that children should be exposed to real-world issues and cultural diversity (“interracial books”), a theme that became especially pronounced during World War II. Following discussions of left-wing efforts through the New Masses and organizations such as the League of American Writers to expand a leftist presence in children's literature, and institutional developments among educators, librarians, and publishers (including union efforts among teachers, the formation of a Progressive Librarians Council, and the development of the 25-cent Little Golden Book). The chapter concludes with an analysis of several books that promote an anti-fascist and anti-racist sensibility in children. Among the authors discussed in this chapter are Harry Granick, Marshall McClintock, Mary Elting, Lavinia Davis, John R. Tunis, Florence Crannell Means, Doris Gates, Henry Gregor Felsen, and Emma Gelders Sterne.

The Yale Child Study Center, through its Program for HIV-Affected Children and Families, has developed a community-based approach to the mental health care of children and families beset by HIV/AIDS. This chapter explores the unique opportunities inherent in providing mental health care to HIV-infected and HIV-affected children using non-traditional techniques. The chapter begins by briefly providing a history of HIV-affected children on a national level, followed by a detailed discussion of the Program for HIV-Affected Children and Families, including the issues faced by these children and their families. Two case vignettes illustrate the need and challenges of home-based work with HIV-affected children.

This chapter examines in detail the process notes of the Yale Longitudinal Study (YLS). The process notes, amounting to thousands of pages, were the result of sessions between the young girl Evelyn and Samuel Ritvo. The chapter focuses on Evelyn's awakening interest in how her status as a female related to the male-dominated social hierarchy that she encountered at each stage of her development. Evelyn's transcripts are an unusually rich source of information about child development at the time the YLS was undertaken. Ritvo and members of the Yale Child Study Center made contemporaneous observations of Evelyn's therapy from 1954 to 1963.

This book explores the history as well as the sociocultural context of a unique study that was undertaken between the mid-1950s and mid-1960s: the Yale Longitudinal Study (YLS). Carried out by a team of therapist-researchers at the Yale Child Study Center, the YLS documented the early and middle childhood years of a dozen children in New Haven County, Connecticut. The book analyzes and contextualizes the intellectual worldview of the group involved in the study—which integrates mental health, pediatrics, psychoanalysis, and social science—as well as the important insights it provided about children's developmental trajectories from infancy through middle childhood.

This chapter focuses on child welfare during the late 19th century until the early 20th century. The chapter immediately starts off with a discussion of the background of child welfare during this period. It then introduces the Child Study Movement, which helped in positioning the social, educational, and psychological importance of understanding the child. Child cruelty and the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) are the main focus of one section, which includes a discussion of the founding of the NSPCC and the passing of the Children's Charter. The chapter also considers the 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act, which was drafted due to the increase in juvenile prostitution and the selling of British girls. This was followed by the 1908 Punishment of Incest Act, the direct result of a campaign conducted during the early 1890s. Various other programs and laws that were introduced and drafted during this period are discussed, such as the School Meals Service and the Infant Welfare Movement.

This chapter focuses on Clara Ellen Grant. Grant was one of nine children of a fairly prosperous family in a Wiltshire village. As a young girl, she aspired to be a teacher in London. However, her plan shifted to working with the Universities' Mission in Central Africa. After finishing her training as a teacher at the Salisbury Training College, she moved to London and held two teaching positions. Grant's next position was in a small local Board school on Bow Common, which was eventually named after her. While working at the school, she turned her home into a settlement house, called the Fern Street Settlement. Her settlement house provided help and recreation to schoolchildren of the whole neighborhood. Aside from providing a settlement house, Grant was also active in the discussions and debates about early childhood education at a time when elementary schools admitted children as young as three. She was also involved in the Child Study Movement and fiercely advocated her pedagogical views. She also wrote a series of letters to The School Child, which showed her to be a fiery champion of the poor. This chapter presents one of Grant's letters to the The School Child. This letter provides particulars of her School Settlement.

The aim of this chapter is to examine young women’s experience of mental health problems during the perinatal period. We shall argue that women who were young at the time of their transition to parenthood are at elevated risk for perinatal depression, in their first and subsequent pregnancies. Evidence for the impact of perinatal depression on children’s development will be outlined, and we propose that the elevated rates of mental health problems among young mothers may partly account for the increased prevalence of adverse outcomes often seen among their children. However, for these young women and their offspring, the impact of perinatal depression may be compounded by many other social, psychological, and biological risk factors, and young women’s circumstances may exacerbate their own and their children’s difficulties. Therefore any clinical strategies regarding the identification and treatment of depression during the antenatal and postnatal months may need to take into account the age of women, with women bearing children earlier and later than the average presenting different challenges for health professionals. Across the industrialized nations the demographics of parenthood are changing, with both men and women first becoming parents at increasingly older ages (Bosch 1998; Martin et al. 2005; Ventura et al. 2001). In the UK for example, the average maternal age at first birth in 1971 was 23.7 years, compared to the present figure of 29.5 years (ONS 2012). Correspondingly, over the last four decades, birth rates for women aged 30 and over have increased extensively, whilst those for women in their teenage years and early twenties have declined (ONS 2012, 2007). Since the 1970s, the proportion of children born to women aged 20–24 in the UK has been decreasing, with women aged 30–34 years now displaying the highest birth rates (ONS 2010). These changes in the demography of parenthood are not confined to the UK with similar trends toward delayed first births observed across Western Europe (Ventura et al. 2001), the United States (Mirowsky 2002), New Zealand (Woodward et al. 2006) and Australia (Barnes 2003). Thus, a transition to parenthood during adolescence and the early 20s is non-normative for Western women, and the implications of this ‘off-time’ transition (Elder 1997, 1998) for the mother’s and the child’s mental health warrants attention.

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.

While the physical health of women and children is emphasized in international policy guidelines, the mental dimensions of their health are often ignored, especially in developing countries. However, recent and strong evidence suggests that the mental and physical health of mothers and children is inextricably linked, and the one cannot be possible without the other (Prince et al. 2007). This chapter reviews the evidence and suggests directions for policy and research in this area. Depression is the fourth leading cause of disease burden and the largest cause of nonfatal burden, accounting for almost 12% of all total years lived with disability worldwide. Depression around childbirth is common, affecting approximately 10–15% of all mothers in Western societies (O’Hara and Swain 1996). Epidemiological studies from the developing world have reported increasingly high rates of postnatal depression in diverse cultures across the developing world. An early pioneering study by Cox (1979) in a semirural Ugandan tribe found rates of 10% based on the ICD-8 criteria. Two decades later, a community study by Cooper et al. (1999) in a periurban settlement in South Africa, found rates of 34.7%, an increase of over threefold. Hospital-based studies have found rates of 23% in Goa, India (Patel et al. 2002), 22% in eastern Turkey (Inandi 2002) and 15.8% in Dubai, United Arab Emirates (Goubash and Abou-Saleh 1997). A rural-community study in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, reported over 25% women suffering from depression in the antenatal period and 28% in the postnatal period (Rahman et al. 2007). Over half these women were found to be still depressed a year later (Rahman and Creed 2007). A recent meta-analysis shows that the rates in low- and middle-income countries (LAMIC) are higher than high income countries, ranging from 18–25% (Fisher et al. 2012). Risk factors identified include previous psychiatric problems, life events in the previous year, poor marital relationship, lack of social support, and economic deprivation. Female infant gender was found to be an important determinant of postnatal depression in India, but not in South Africa. Importantly, postnatal depression was found to be associated with high degrees of chronicity, disability and disturbances of mother–infant relationship.

The second chapter continues with the equation of the child in relation to the future, taking up the centrality of reproduction to any ethics premised on human survival. Through a reading of Joanna Russ’s 1977 novel We Who Are About To, it considers narrative structures that refuse generational survival and intergenerational rescue, as rescue requires everything to hold its shape, to remain as it is, long enough to be rescued. Therefore, it isn’t that the world is acausal but that causality is richer and stranger than rescue and survival narratives can imagine. Ideologies of reproduction are one of the modes by which we attempt to manage biological, chemical, and ontological affectivities.

Chapter 2 explores how childhood has become a means of projecting the present into the future and of making such imagined futures practical and technical. Drawing from Agamben’s analysis of the modern ‘anthropological machine’, the chapter presents childhood as a threshold spanning animal/human, nature/culture and voice/language, tracking this through a textual analysis of Rousseau, J. S. Mill, G. Stanley Hall, James Sully and Phillip Pettit. This in turn serves as the historical backdrop used in subsequent chapters, specifically in terms of examining how biosocial power is deployed in the form of playgrounds, children’s citizenship and children’s health initiatives, as a way of preventing or ameliorating disadvantage, and as entrepreneurship education.

Legal wrangling, court decisions, and the timeline of a bill as it becomes law are not always met with public scrutiny or interest. However, there are many seminal moments that have shaped policies, legislation, and litigation in the areas of civil rights and the education of students with special needs. The keystone legislation examined in this chapter has continued to define us as a country and shape our public policy. Influenced by the civil rights movement, parents and advocates of students with special needs learned that true progress for their causes is steeped in the court houses and lawmaking bodies of our states, districts, and in Washington, DC. It is through legislation and litigation that change becomes reality. It was through this paradigm shift that the lives of students with special needs and their families improved. In addition, advocates learned that it is also possible to improve the quality of life for all students. It is through inclusion and an increasingly widened lens when viewing differences and diversity that all students (those with and without special needs) in our schools have the opportunity to learn and grow with those who are different. The path for all, then, is expanded and enriched for the experiences shared through an inclusive and diverse environment. While Linda Brown, and all other students who are African-American are now eligible to attend their neighborhood schools, students with special needs are often bused far from their neighborhoods to be educated with other students because the school system has decided to segregate them according to ability and disability. If Linda had autism today, she might have to ride a bus for an hour and a half (each way) to school every day when her local elementary school is no farther from her home than the Sumner School was in 1951. We clearly still have a long way to go in delineating the rights of all citizens to equal access under the law. The Brown v. Board of Education (1954) case was very important to the cause of those seeking to have students with special needs included in the public schools.