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This book defends a particular liberal conception of justice and legitimacy, and applies it to certain issues concerning the upbringing of children. It begins by offering an account of liberal political morality that draws on the work of Rawls and Dworkin. It then defends the claim that the distribution of childrearing rights should be sensitive to the interests of both children and parents. With respect to the issue of whether it is permissible to impart controversial values to children, a distinction is drawn between shaping children’s political motivations and enrolling them into disputed conceptions of the good. Whereas there is a requirement of liberal legitimacy to foster liberal virtues of civility and reciprocity, the widely held view that the enrolment of children into particular ethical or religious practices is rejected as illegitimate. Finally, the practice of age-based discrimination in the case of the allocation of certain rights, such as the right to vote, is defended and criteria for determining the appropriate age of majority are discussed.

Defends a theory of social justice for education from within an egalitarian version of liberalism. The theory involves a strong commitment to educational equality, and to the idea that children's rights include a right to personal autonomy. The book argues that school reform must always be evaluated from the perspective of social justice and applies the theory, in particular, to school choice proposals. It looks at the parental choice schemes in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and in England and Wales, and argues that they fall short of the requirements of justice, but that not all such schemes must do so. It elaborates an abstract voucher scheme that would combine choice with justice, and offers ways by which actual choice‐based reform can be modified to meet the requirements of justice.

The problem of education in liberal democracies is to ensure the intergenerational continuity of their constitutive political ideals while remaining open to a diversity of conduct and belief that sometimes threatens those ideals. Creating Citizens addresses this problem. The book identifies both the principal aims of political education—liberal patriotism and the sense of justice—and the rights that limit their public pursuit. The public pursuit of these educational aims is properly constrained by deference to the rights of parents, and these are shown to have some independent moral weight underived from the rights of children. The liberal state's possible role in the sponsorship and the control of denominational school is discussed, as are the benefits and hazards of moral dialogue in morally diverse educational environments. The book draws heavily on John Rawls's theory of justice.

At the time of the Nazi invasion in May 1940, Belgium was a Catholic country with linguistic divisions between north and south. The Catholic Church was the only institution untouched by the German occupiers. Therefore many hunted Jews sought the Church's help, which was spontaneously extended by the lower clergy. The book is based on unstructured interviews with formerly hidden children, with nuns who sheltered them, and with two surviving escorts who worked for the Committee for the Defense of Jews resistance network and took the children from their families to convents willing to hide them. The interviews detail from the point of view of both nuns and children how the children were integrated into daily convent life and how they reacted to Catholic rituals and socialization. The lives are framed by their historical context. The chapter on the escorts and on the Committee for the Defense of Jews leads to a general discussion of the different facets of the Belgian resistance. A chapter on memory and commemoration then traces the emergence of the concept of the hidden child and the construction of collective memories. The chapter also addresses the formal recognition of rescuers as “Righteous Among the Nations” and offers an in‐depth interpretation of Yad Vashem, the memorial institution of Israel. At the same time, it uncovers how gender initially played a major role in the recognition of priests and nuns who were rescuers. The struggle for the souls of some orphaned Jewish children who were baptized during the war and whose return to the Jewish community was contested is discussed as a particularly painful episode. This book contributes to Holocaust literature written in English about Belgium, a country given relatively too little attention. With its focus on commemoration, the book also adds to the understanding of how memory is institutionalized and reinforced by mnemonic practices.

How did the United States move from seeing preschool as a way to give the nation's poorest children a “head start” to seeing preschool as the beginning of public education for all children? Advocates and policymakers have recently had remarkable success at expanding preschool in many parts of the country, and are gaining support for federal action as well. Yet questions still remain about the best ways to shape policy that will fulfill the promise of preschool. The Promise of Preschool investigates how policy choices in the past forty‐five years—such as the creation of Head Start in the 1960s, efforts to craft a child care system in the 1970s, and the campaign to reform K‐12 schooling in the 1980s—helped shape the decisions that policymakers are now making about early education. In addition to exploring the sources of today's preschool movement, the book also examines policy questions such as, should preschool be provided to all children, or just to the neediest? Should it be run by public schools, or incorporate private child care providers? What are the most important ways to ensure educational quality? By looking at these policy issues through the lens of history, the book offers a unique perspective on this important area of education reform, and explores how an understanding of the past can help spur debate about today's decisions.

Over the last half a century, technological and medical advances, shifting patterns of employment, the loosening of marital bonds, changing social norms, and the women's rights movement have dramatically altered the landscape of family life. On this new terrain, parents struggle with balancing the demands of work and child care responsibilities, selecting the right schools, and sorting through a bewildering array of medical and psychological nostrums. At the same time, public officials are under increasing pressure to formulate policies that assist parents to meet the challenges of childrearing in contemporary society. This book looks at the troubling concerns of childrearing in modern family life, and raises provocative questions about the benefits and hazards of policy alternatives designed to alleviate these issues. It frames the emerging needs and new risks that impact child rearing, addressing controversial issues such as the roles of schools and government in promoting children's health, the facts and the myths about Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), the family dynamics of balancing work and childcare, and allocating responsibility for care and support of children when family life breaks down. The book analyzes a range of state interventions to assist parents in dealing with these issues. Although these interventions are sometimes seen as a substitute for parental authority, the book explains how they can be framed as efforts to empower parents.

Across the world, children are the most vulnerable population. The threats to them may vary, but wherever one looks, children are endangered and exploited. Using the Convention on the Rights of the Child as a base, threats to child well-being globally are examined, in countries both in the Global North and the Global South. The history of the Convention is examined, together with evolving understanding of childhood in different cultures. Different forms of child labor are discussed, including street children, child trafficking and child soldiers. How war affects children who are not directly involved in combat is examined in a separate chapter. The issues of child maltreatment and adoption are discussed along the Hague Convention and child trafficking for the purposes of adoption. Educational issues are explored in countries around the world including the growing movement towards Universal Primary Education (UPE) as well as high dropout rates in the United States. The final content chapter discusses how many of these issues, together with others such as Female Genital Cutting (FGC) and fistulas, disproportionately affect girls. The book closes with a summary chapter underlining the importance of addressing these issues to allow children to achieve their adult potential.

Until now, American political thought and public policy have said little about the centrality of dependency in human lives, and the important role that families serve in dealing with it. Instead, they have generally conceptualized citizens as able adults, ignoring the fact that all citizens are, for significant periods of their lives, dependent on others to meet important needs. Focusing on the dependency of the human condition makes the picture of what citizens need more complex than this current conception would have it: Citizens require more than the liberty and equality that able adults might seek; they also need caretaking and human development. As our society is currently structured, these functions will largely be handled by families. The task of integrating dependency and the role that families play in dealing with it into the liberal democratic theory that undergirds American public policy is the subject of this book. It argues that supporting caretaking and human development are as central to the responsibilities of the state as ensuring a competent police force to ensure citizens' safety. In the “supportive state” model that is developed, the state's responsibility to support families does not usurp the responsibility of family members for meeting their members' dependency needs. Instead, families appropriately bear responsibility for the day-to-day caring for (or arranging the care for) members with dependency needs. Meanwhile, the state bears the responsibility for structuring societal institutions to help families both to meet their caretaking needs and to promote adequate human development.

This book is a study of Euripides' so-called ‘political plays’ (Children of Herakles and Suppliant Women). Still disdained as the anomalously patriotic or propagandistic works of a playwright elsewhere famous for his subversive, ironic, artistic ethos, the two works in question — notorious for their uncomfortable juxtaposition of political speeches and scenes of extreme feminine emotion — continue to be dismissed by scholars of tragedy as artistic failures unworthy of the author of Medea, Hippolytus, and Bacchae. This study makes use of recent insights into classical Greek conceptions of gender (in real life and on stage) and Athenian notions of civic identity to demonstrate that the political plays are, in fact, intellectually subtle and structurally coherent exercises in political theorizing — works that use complex interactions between female and male characters to explore the advantages, and costs, of being a member of the polis.

Research in children's mental health lags behind research for adults, in part because it is intrinsically context-bound. Children are embedded in families, in schools, and in communities who have responsibility for their care. Making research findings useful and ensuring that they are applied to improve the lives of children and families require attention to these contexts. This entails a process of collaboration with many partners: teachers, nurses, healthcare providers, church leaders, neighborhood group directors, and other community leaders. The process of collaboration in children's mental health is complicated, but the products that it yields have the potential to benefit both children and families. This volume, with the toolkit and casebook that it contains, distills the process of collaboration into manageable steps, and provides concrete examples of how researchers have addressed specific challenges. The premise of this book is that collaborative research, in contrast to traditional research paradigms, will yield findings that are more ethical, valid, and useful. Highlighting the transformation of science from ivory tower theories to action-oriented practices, this book offers practical advice for researchers and practitioners interested in using data to inform and transform children's mental health. Concrete examples of projects that have involved community leaders and researchers provide an insider's guide to conducting successful collaborations that can yield better results than traditional top-down research paradigms.

Despite children making up around a quarter of the population, the first edition of this book was the first to focus on a public health approach to the health and sickness of children and young people. It combined clinical and academic perspectives to explore the current state of health of our children, the historical roots of the speciality, and the relationship between early infant and child health on later adult health. Child public health is a rapidly developing field, and is increasingly recognised throughout the world as a major area of focus for population health. Targeting the health of children now is essential if we are to achieve a healthy population as adults. For the second edition the text has been revised and updated with new material on health for all children, global warming, child participation, systems theory, refugees, commissioning, and sustainable development.

This book presents a vision of childhood victimization, one that unifies the conventional subdivisions like child molestation, child abuse, street crime, bullying, and exposure to community violence. It shows how children are the most criminally victimized segment of the population, with over one-in-five facing multiple, serious “poly-victimizations” during a single year. Developmental Victimology, the book’s term for this new integrative perspective, looks at how victimization changes across the span of childhood and offers insights about how to categorize juvenile victimizations and how to think about risk and impact developmentally. It presents new data about unexpected declines in childhood victimization during the 1990s and early 2000s and suggest some of the reasons for this drop. The book also provides a new model of society’s response to child victimization — the Juvenile Victim Justice System — and a fresh way of thinking about barriers that victims and their families encounter when seeking help.

Survival analysis is a class of statistical methods for studying the occurrence and timing of events. Statistical analysis of longitudinal data, particularly censored data, lies at the heart of social work research, and many of social work research's empirical problems, such as child welfare, welfare policy, evaluation of welfare-to-work programs, and mental health, can be formulated as investigations of timing of event occurrence. Social work researchers also often need to analyze multilevel or grouped data (for example, event times formed by sibling groups or mother-child dyads or recurrences of events such as re-entries into foster care), but these and other more robust methods can be challenging to social work researchers without a background in higher math. With clearly written summaries and plentiful examples, all written with social work issues and social work researchers in mind, this pocket guide will put this important statistical tool in the hands of many more social work researchers than have been able to use it before, to the field's benefit.

It is argued that the strong claim biological parents have to raise their children isn't a property right but an instance of our general right to continue whatever we have begun. Implications are drawn for a wide range of cases in which there is a dispute over who should serve as parents to a child. Arguments are offered against saying that our only proper concern in such cases is the best interest of the child. A way is offered of also identifying what claims the various adults have in the matter and deciding how those are properly balanced with the child's own claims. The book also contends that children have a claim of their own to have their autonomy respected. Conclusions are drawn about paternalism toward one's children, about reacting differently to bad behavior when the wrongdoer is “only a child,” and about the way in which children should participate in their raising. A final set of chapters concern parents and their grown children. One conclusion is that parents do not have an obligation to love their grown children come what may. Another is that the filial obligations grown children have are best understood not as debts of gratitude but as obligations to give your parents a place in your affections that is roughly equivalent to the one they gave you while you were under their care. The closing chapter offers an alternative to John Hardwig's view about an obligation to die rather than cost your loved ones too dearly.

Millions of children suffer from diseases and illnesses who do not have adequate treatment. And many other children are harmed by medicines intended to help them. To protect and help these children society needs to conduct pediatric research. Yet, critics and courts have argued that it is unethical to expose children to research risks for the benefit of others. They argue that this practice violates our obligation to protect children and exploits them for the benefit of others. In this way, clinical research with children poses what appears to be an irresolvable dilemma: either we can protect pediatric subjects from exploitation or we can protect pediatric patients from dangerous medicines, but not both. The present work, which is the first to systematically evaluate this dilemma, offers an original justification for pediatric research based on an in-depth analysis of when it is in our interests to help others.

To what extent should parents be allowed to use selection technologies (such as preimplantation genetic diagnosis) to determine the characteristics of their children? And is there something morally wrong with parents who wish to do this? Choosing Tomorrow's Children provides answers to these questions. In particular, the book applies the techniques of philosophical bioethics to address issues raised by selective reproduction, the practice of choosing between different possible future persons by selecting or deselecting (for example) embryos, eggs, and sperm. It offers answers to questions including the following. Do children have a ‘right to an open future’ and, if they do, what moral constraints does this place upon selective reproduction? Under what circumstances (if any) should sex selection be allowed? Should we ‘screen out’ as much disease and disability as possible before birth, or would that be an objectionable form of eugenics? Is it acceptable to create or select a future person (a ‘saviour sibling’) in order to provide life-saving tissue for an existing relative? Is there a moral difference between selecting to avoid disease and selecting to produce an ‘enhanced’ child? And should we allow deaf parents to use reproductive technologies to ensure that they have a deaf child? The book does not provide one overarching conclusion but rather assesses each argument-type on its merits. Insofar as it is possible to generalise though, Choosing Tomorrow's Children concludes that most of the arguments usually provided against selective reproduction are flawed in one way or another.

Why is there child labour? Are there arguments for abolishing or curtailing all forms of child labour, or just morally and physically dangerous ones like soldiering and prostitution? Given that at least some forms of child labour ought to be abolished or curtailed, which is the most effective way of doing it? The book tries to answer these questions both theoretically and empirically. Child labour can be inefficiently high or inefficiently low, but more likely the former. Market and government failure can lead to children being effectively sold into slavery. Even the most common and least objectionable forms of child work, helping parents on the family farm or with domestic chores, have harmful effects. The mechanisms that produce excessive child labour are the same that produce excessive fertility and infant mortality. There is no single remedy for child labour. A ban is unlikely to be effective on its own. The list of effective instruments includes not only obvious candidates like schools, credit, and cover against certain risks, but also less obvious ones like sanitation and preventive medicine. Even humdrum policies such as bringing electricity and piped water into people’s homes can significantly reduce child labour.

Religious free exercise conflicts occur when religiously compelled behavior (whether action or inaction) appears to violate a law that contraindicates or even criminalizes such behavior. Fearful of the anarchy of religious conscience, the U.S. Supreme Court opted instead for authoritarianism in this church and state matter: The state's need for civil order is conclusively presumed to be achieved by enforcing uniform obedience to generally applicable laws, and thus legislation must trump the human and constitutional right to religious freedom. Rejecting the Court's unthinking rigorism, the book more appropriately views a free exercise case as a conflict of principles or “goods”: the basic constitutional and human right to freedom of conscience and religious freedom versus the societal good furthered and protected by the legislation. The book recommends an alternative analytical free exercise process grounded within the common law tradition as well as social ethics: casuistry. Casuistical reasoning requires a careful analysis of the particulars and factual context of the case, and relies upon analogies and paradigmatic illustrations to get to the heart of the principles at issue. The book furthermore explores the panoply of theories, self‐understandings, typologies, contexts, and societal constructs at play in free exercise conflicts, and in the final chapters applies casuistry to two free exercise situations, spiritual healing methods applied to children, and ingestion of sacramental peyote in Native American Church rituals.

Interest in the problem of children who resist contact with or become alienated from a parent after separation or divorce is growing, due in part to parents' increasing frustrations with the apparent ineffectiveness of the legal system in handling these unique cases. There is a need for legal and mental health professionals to improve their understanding of, and response to, this polarizing social dynamic. This book is a critical, empirically based review of parental alienation that integrates the best research evidence with clinical insight from interviews with leading scholars and practitioners. The text draws upon the growing body of mental health and legal literature to summarize the historical development and controversies surrounding the concept of “alienation” and explain the causes, dynamics, and differentiation of various types of parent-child relationship issues. The chapters review research on prevalence, risk factors, indicators, assessment, and measurement to form a conceptual integration of multiple factors relevant to the etiology and maintenance of the problem of strained parent-child relationships. A differential approach to assessment and intervention is provided. Children's rights, the role of their wishes and preferences in legal proceedings, and the short- and long-term impact of parental alienation are also discussed.

Research has already been a significant factor in child welfare policy in recent years, but this book demonstrates that it has taken a leading role in the field to spur and guide change. The chapters in this book assess the effect of research on the full spectrum of child welfare services. The book covers every base. The opening chapters situate child welfare research in the modern context; they are followed by discussions of evidence-based practice in the field, arguably its most pressing concern now. Recent years have seen historic rises in the number of children adopted through public agencies and, accordingly, permanent placement and family ties are critical topics that occupy the book's core, along with chapters broaching the thorny questions that surround decision-making and risk assessment. The urgent need for a more effective use of research and evidence is highlighted again with looks at the future of child protection and how concrete data can influence policy and help children. Finally, in recognition of the growing importance of a global view, closing chapters address international issues in child welfare research, including an examination of policies from abroad and a multinational comparison of the economic challenges facing single mothers and their children.