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This presents a multiple-level contextual approach to test the impact of contextual variables on child-level outcomes. It is hypothesized that child welfare agencies with high levels of both information processing and interagency collaboration will be associated with better child functioning outcomes.

Child welfare gets involved when children and families manifestly have serious trouble in organising their lives. The concepts of children's and parents' agency and child welfare agency are interrelated. This book investigates the dynamics of child (development), welfare and agency in the various different contexts in which they appear. It is addressed to those professionals in child welfare who think their agency is under threat, and who are convinced of the relevance of their work without it being demonstrable by means of randomised clinical trials. It specifically introduces Jennifer, who looks much like a child welfare client. In addition, it hopes to make clear that the quality of child welfare problems lies in the realm of narrative and is dialogical. To elucidate the dialogical nature of personhood in child development, Lacan's linguistic interpretation of psychoanalytical theory is relied.

Continuing difficulties for unmarried mothers and their children despite improvements. Margaret Thatcher's Conservative Governments, cuts to welfare, pressure on mothers to work, but childcare hard to find and contracting labour market. ‘Broken families’ blamed for social problems as divorce, cohabitation, and babies born out of wedlock rose to unprecedented levels. Government claims that ‘teenage mothers’ got pregnant to get a council house and welfare benefits. Disproved by research but accusations continued into 1990s. Successful efforts by OPF to set up courses to help mothers into work, strongly supported by mothers. In 1987, all legal differences between ‘legitimate’ and ‘illegitimate’ children eliminated after long campaign by NC/OPF. In 1991 the establishment of Child Support Agency, badly designed in a hurry and made access to maintenance and benefits more difficult and conditions worsened. Intensified government attacks on lone, especially unmarried mothers, until Conservatives lost 1997 election.

The concluding chapter draws a connection between the conceptual and practical strategies presented in Part Two and the empirically driven discussions in Part Three. It proposes to ‘rematerialise’ children’s agency by a) recognising heterogeneous elements that constitute children’s capacity to act; b) reconnecting this capacity with children’s everyday environments; c) establishing this capacity in how we, as adults, act towards children but also the rest of the society.

The introduction to Between Generations establishes a thorough critical and literary framework for understanding the import and history of adult-child collaboration. It first provides a concise account of children’s literature scholarship that takes on the vexed concept of child agency, from the 1980s to the present, and outlines the book’s methodology in locating and interpreting accounts of adult-child collaboration—a methodology that takes into account real and fictive collaborations as well as what the author calls hybrid collaborations. These hybrid collaborations are new models of authorship grounded in relationships between real adults and children, but adults fictionalize those relationships or describe them using language associated with powerful social constructions of childhood. Disentangling complex representations of collaborations—approaching them with the skepticism children’s literature demands but also with open-mindedness to the possibility of a child’s creative agency—is a complex but productive practice that is at the center of Between Generations.

This chapter examines how child welfare agencies manage applications from prospective families headed by lesbians and gay men, what unique issues are encountered in this process, and how gays and lesbians respond to the homestudy assessment process. States and child welfare agencies are responsible for ensuring a timely and appropriate foster or adoptive family for every child who needs one. In meeting this responsibility, states and child welfare agencies must explore all potential resources for all children and youth awaiting placement in a family, including qualified lesbians and gay men who wish to parent and are eager to open their hearts and lives to children and youth in need.

This chapter explores intergenerational collaborations that draw upon the resources of the child artists. It puts side-by-side changing perspectives on art by children and new modes in illustrations for children to chart changing perceptions of children as producers and consumers of art. The chapter begins by examining writing about child artists—from the educational philosophies of Froebel and Cizek to theories of child art and child agency drawn from Child Study. This archive frames child artists as both imitative and inventive and illuminates the literature considered in the chapter’s second section: texts in which adult authors partner with young illustrators, real and imagined, including Browning’s “Pied Piper” and the nonsense illustrations of Lear. The result is a partial history of the “discovery” of child art in the nineteenth and early twentieth century in light of intergenerational collaboration and a reflection on the consequences of that discovery in children’s culture.

This chapter explores the effect of a new child welfare policy on dialogical services. It starts by discussing the social mission of child welfare. It then goes on to explain the rise of a new dialogical management culture. Special attention is paid to the value of management knowledge, the differences between material and immaterial services and the implementation of free market principles in child welfare. A dialogical approach of management is brought to the fore. The task of child welfare is to support continuity in families at risk by repairing or replacing their agency. Furthermore, five features that catch the eye are elaborated: control, standardisation, client orientation, management style and expertise. The dialogue is central to good management in child welfare. Dialogue with clients came under pressure as professionals needed more time for reporting, evaluation and accounting, while doubts were replaced by rapid decisions.

This chapter considers the question of how different kinds of textual transformations affect child agency, seeking the answer by analyzing two children's texts that have been adapted into both comic and film: Neil Gaiman's Coraline and Jeanne DuPrau's City of Ember. It argues that in comparison to film adaptations, comic adaptations of text-only narratives offer children greater degrees of agency over their reading experience and frequently portray adult–child relationships with more emphasis on childhood independence and power. Still, both comic and film adaptations also reinforce adult–child power dynamics that place adults in power over children, a tradition in children's literature created in part by the unique situation of adults writing for children. This paradigm, however, also enculturates children into a system that often limits their agency.

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.

This chapter examines Golden Age authors for children who invited young people into roles of authority through creative collaboration. It traces how Charles Dickens, William Brighty Rands, J. M. Barrie, and others consulted children, real and imagined, as experts who might support or critique the expectations of adults, upending traditional adult-child relationships to entertain the possibility of child agency—especially in topsy-turvy children’s literature plots. While the upside-down logic of the child in charge was a quaint notion for many Victorians, a survey of real and imagined child authorities reveals that adults considered complete child autonomy undesirable or impossible. Authors, librarians, and book reviewers therefore did not cede power to children but negotiated shared authority—a partnership between generations in which adults recognize children as experts and adapt to their perspectives. Such partnerships introduce anxieties about how to access children’s voices in their most pristine form.

For many years, married women who needed protection used the Magistrates’ Courts, which had a (very restricted) jurisdiction to make orders in cases where wife and children needed financial support from the husband. How should those orders be enforced? Was there any scope for social work intervention? The State provided support through the Poor Law and then, after World War II, through welfare benefits; but should the adults involved be ultimately responsible for the cost? Eventually the Child Support Act 1991 introduced what was intended to be a modern and scientific system under which a Child Support Agency would use a formula to calculate responsibility for family support and have recourse to efficient business management tools to enforce the obligations. The scheme did not work out wholly as had been hoped.

Between Generations argues that the Golden Age of children’s literature was marked by critical interest in child agency, creating ideal cultural conditions for the emergence of intergenerational collaboration. However, an investment in children as creative actors persists long past the nineteenth century. This conclusion details two twentieth-century collaborations: the professional partnership among Arthur Ransome, Katharine Hull, and Pamela Whitlock and the photography collaboration between photojournalist Timothy Archibald and his son. These examples underscore the utility of collaboration as a critical lens for present-day scholars of the Victorian period and of childhood more generally. Collaboration is a valuable analytic that suspends in productive dialogue the tension between real children and figurations of childhood. It not only reframes the Golden Age—redefining the roles adults and children fulfill in the creation of children’s literature and in the construction of childhood—but also expands how scholars might think about adult-child relationships writ large.

This chapter introduces the case of Jennifer, who has been living in children's homes and foster families since the age of two. She has a history of neglect and abuse. Throughout her young life, Jennifer was shuttled between family and agency. Ellen is Jennifer's mentor during her current stay in sheltered lodgings. Ellen works in a non-dialogical environment in which she is barely able to express her observations and concerns about Jennifer in her own words. When she was admitted to child welfare, the professionals involved were not able to repair the damage done, partly because child welfare policy is disciplinary rather than dialogical. She also lacks a solid awareness of continuity, being unable to trust herself as someone capable of being relying on in different situations. In line with this, this book is an imperfect contribution to an imperfect child welfare practice.

This chapter investigates the resources that have long been employed to measure levels and rates of child abuse and neglect. It addresses workforce issues, particularly worker caseloads, unionization, pay, professionalism, and quality. Additionally, it evaluates the issues of case management, quality control, technology, and worker training strategies. It specifically discusses how child protective services (CPS) agency resource inputs, most especially the frontline workforce, are influenced by bursts of social outrage. A reinvigorated and accountable case management system is the key component of CPS reform. It is shown that about 70% of states attained substantial compliance with federal standards. Data also reveal that child deaths have profound and sometimes devastating effects on CPS workers. Since the early 1990s, child fatalities have risen at a slow and steady rate. In 2007, overall child maltreatment rates have decreased, while CPS investigation rates have arisen.

Even when parents exercise their power in a paternalistic fashion so as to make up for children’s deficits, parents can be faced with moral dilemmas, conflicts which call into question the legitimacy of parents’ exercise of power even in these instances. This is the case, I shall argue in this chapter, because a number of different moral considerations are relevant when we consider children’s agency, and they can pull in different directions and make incompatible demands when we evaluate parents’ power. In particular, we address the following question: how do we evaluate situations where, while promoting children’s positive freedom, parents violate the rights that protect children’s negative freedom?

This chapter discusses how children at risk of maltreatment are removed from home in the United States. We discuss the legislative framework and the processes and agents involved in the decision-making process around removal, including child protection agencies and courts. The chapter presents evidence on several major blind spots in the system, including bias and delays in decision-making. Thus, it reveals the need for further research on how these blind spots impact children and their families, as well as on the impact of programs that aim at improving them. Further, this chapter also underscores the need for systemic change to ensure that bias can be eliminated and children and parents, especially those with the least amount of resources, also can be engaged and empowered users of the system.

This chapter examines how Barnardo used narrative to create entrepreneurial roles for children as fundraisers. He wrote and published a plethora of stories for children in the periodicals he owned and edited for children, relying on Harriet Beecher Stowe’s qualification associated with Uncle Tom’s Cabin for proper narrative: that is, a reliance on ‘real’ events in order to motivate readers’ sympathies and provoke widespread commitment to eradicate the world’s evils. The chapter examines the generic aspects of children’s periodicals to show how Barnardo used existing modes of periodical publication to generate forms of agency for children, specifically relying on notions of embodied sacrifice. The chapter demonstrates how Barnardo’s publications for children ask readers to identify with other children as ‘like-to-like’ subjects, as both supporters and recipients. The discussion reveals Barnardo’s shift to motivate children through emotions linked with family, recognizing their work as of national and civic obligation as Christian duty. Thus, the chapter demonstrates Barnardo’s shift from evangelical conversion to the development of the healthy, productive citizen that would reverberate throughout the British Empire.

This chapter explores the scholarship regarding a further understanding of a child's agency, voice, and maturity in discussing spiritual matters. It argues that the dominance of cognitive-developmentalism and stage theory has impeded our understanding of religious and spiritual growth and subsequently our ability to impute to children agency, voice, and maturity. However, the chapter likewise outlines some changes and advances in our understanding of children, focusing mainly on recent views of children as thinkers and as active participants in family interaction and communication about religious issues. This chapter moves further by providing suggestions of how to move forward methodologically to better understand children's agency, voice, and maturity. Doing so will help us better reconcile the complex tension between thinking of children as full-fledged “beings” or young and immature “becomings.”