Children's Worth Research Articles

Feeling Less Than Other People: attainment scores as symbols of children's worth

This article addresses how an educational purpose of social efficiency, such as the one we have in England, affects each child's school Life-history and the process through which children thereby come to identify themselves. The author considers whether schools could engage in practices that decrease pupils' resignation to a system that controls them, and enhance children's resilience; she also considers their resistance towards being unjustly controlled. She addresses this question by exploring primary schooling's relatively recent practice of grouping children according to their attainment scores on tests of maths and writing. She explores how such grouping may contribute to a perception of children as only as valuable as their test scores. With reference to a particular pupil, Wayne, who describes his school Life-history, the author emphasises how struggling with one high-stakes subject can lead children to a sense of being 'less than other people', even when a child has obvious knowledge and skill in other curriculum areas. She then previews a Leverhulme research project which has recently begun, which narrates and investigates 'Children's Life-histories In Primary Schools' (CLIPS) across five years of school, to identify the role played by attainment labels in children's social and cognitive development.

They "Used to Tear Around the Campus Like Savages": Children's and Youth's Activities in the Santo Tomás Internment Camp, 1942-1945

Commencing late 1941, Japanese soldiers apprehended and interned Western colonials throughout the South Pacific. Drawing on memoirs, diaries, camp documents, and other historical accounts, this article analyzes the intersection of Western mores, wartime captivity, and childhood as it examines the ways Western civilian internees dealt with the hardship and humiliation of imprisonment in the Santo Tomás Internment Camp in Manila. To some extent, internees normalized their daily lives by creating a community that mirrored Western culture and society. Directing and organizing children's and adolescent's activities was one key to this normalization process. In creating structure, order, and affirming children's worth within their community, Western internees sought to preserve and reinforce cultural mores and manners in the face of Japanese ascendency. Further, this study acknowledges and highlights children's agency, exploring their reactions to adults (both Western and Japanese), relationships with one another, and their manipulation of the environment. It appears that, at least initially, many children experienced a degree of freedom within captivity that they had not known prior to war. This study is significant because it complicates current adult-centric studies of World War II internment in the Pacific and illustrates children's integral role in community and cultural identity.

Dream Me Home Safely by Susan Richards Shreve

Children, Youth and Environments Vol. 14 No. 2 (2004) ISSN: 1546-2250 Dream Me Home Safely Shreve, Susan Richards (2003). Boston: Mariner Books, Houghton Mifflin; 223 pages. ISBN 0618379029. In her foreword to this collection in celebration of the 30th anniversary of the Children's Defense Fund, Marion Wright Edelman says accurately that, 'This gift of 34extraordinary American writers sharing their stories of growing up in America paints a complex, richly detailed, and achingly real portrait of American childhood' (p. ix). As one would expect of a collection for this purpose, many of the accounts explore threats that children face. Seven authors describe racism against AfricanAmericans or new Asian immigrants. Joyce Carol Oates presents a young Jewish girl’s inchoate terror in the face of anti-Semitism. Two authors unveil the quiet violence leveled against poor whites. Five describe how others stigmatize or sustain children with polio, tuberculosis, multiple sclerosis, or autism. Two women remember when girls carried the full weight of shame and blame for teen sexuality and pregnancy. Three men recall the weight of family responsibility on their young shoulders in the wake of absent fathers. But these authors are survivors. At some point each gained the victory of being able to articulate these threats, so eloquently that their accounts reach out to others and the authors are freed to creatively move forward with their lives. Julia Alvarez, Ntozake Shangeand Carolyn Ferrell relate how they found this amulet against danger in childhood itself, in the magic worlds of reading or poetry. As Julia Alvarez says in her poem 'Arts Politica,' her family's explanation for how she changed from a clingy, frightened daughter to a feisty, elbows-out child was that she began to read and make things up. In this way, she could make a safer world than the one around her of hurricanes, shanty shacks, poverty, death squads and uncles who disappeared. 376 To save the uncles and free the prisoners in a storybook might not be the destiny of art, but it's a start- my start, our start, if Wordsworth had it right, and the child is the father of the man. The inhumanity of our humanity will not be fixed by metaphor alone. The plot will fail, the tortured will divulge our names, and our human story will end, unless our art can right what happens in the world (pp. 1-2). By articulating terrors and insecurities, by holding them at arm’s length on paper and in books, art presents the eternal hope that we as a community of people may understand the sources of these fears, and by acknowledging and analyzing them, learn to overcome them. Notably, there are no accounts of the worst forms of violence against children, when those responsible for their care and protection turn against them with incest or beatings. Does this most intimate betrayal cut wounds too deep to heal with words? Too shattering to leave any foundation for righting what happens in the world? Every account of threats against children in this collection contains some soft ground where redemption can root- a sheltering family, a parent’s or grandparent's protective love, a parent who teaches tolerance and kindness, or an accepting community. Are these mercies the context that enables writers to remember childhood and give it a voice? Or were these stories selected because they contain this content? Unfortunately, the editor Susan Richards Shreve provides no introduction that might answer these questions. The book's primary theme, celebrated by more than half of the stories, is gratitude for the love of parents and family or a special individual, father, mother, grandmother, or grandfather. In some cases, these adults wove a protective cocoon of love, pride and tough survival around the child, ensuring a safe space where childhood innocence could metamorphose into adult resilience. In other cases, even if special adults were unable to protect their child from the pain of racism, poverty, disability or an absent father, they fiercely 377 demonstrated their child's worth. As Elizabeth Strout noted, it is not only what we look at in childhood that determines our memories, 'but who, in that childhood, looks at us.' 'Children love to...

How Much Are Our Children Worth? Evaluation of Financial Incentives for Pediatric Testing

Biotechnology Law ReportVol. 21, No. 2 PapersHow Much Are Our Children Worth? Evaluation of Financial Incentives for Pediatric TestingCarolyn HackerCarolyn HackerSearch for more papers by this authorPublished Online:5 Jul 2004https://doi.org/10.1089/07300310252962028AboutSectionsPDF/EPUB ToolsPermissionsDownload CitationsTrack CitationsAdd to favorites Back To Publication ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmail FiguresReferencesRelatedDetails Volume 21Issue 2Apr 2002 To cite this article:Carolyn Hacker.How Much Are Our Children Worth? Evaluation of Financial Incentives for Pediatric Testing.Biotechnology Law Report.Apr 2002.113-123.http://doi.org/10.1089/07300310252962028Published in Volume: 21 Issue 2: July 5, 2004PDF download

Aren't Children Worth It?

Aren't Children Worth It?

Modernization Arrested: Child Naming and the Family in a Utah Town

We can no more deny today that American family history is quite as disorganized a state as the family itself than we could when that claim was made in 1965. But whereas two decades ago the problem was a lack of scholarship, now there is clearly an embarrassment of riches. Not only is there evidence to fix the advent of the 'modern' family any time during several centuries; there is also serious challenge to the idea that fundamental change happened at all. Indeed, it may not be realistic to expect an orderly development of a modern family from a traditional one: The kind of change by fits and starts that characterizes the history of American society in general undoubtedly applies as well to the history of the family, and each social class and ethnic group probably has a family history of its own. Disorganization may be the bane of family history simply because it has been the hallmark of America as a society of families.' Yet disorganization does not mean chaos in family history. Evidence about so simple an act as child naming can point to a structure underlying the puzzling variety of past family behavior. Regularities, or lack of them, in name choices give important clues to husbands' and wives' perceptions of their families. Regularities themselves, especially consistent naming of children for relatives, suggest a nonmodern mentality. Rigid rules for naming children are today found mostly in tradition-bound societies; the modern American suburban family, of course, picks whatever names it fancies, generally oblivious to any rules. That contrast implies that naming reflects modernization, and studies of social change occasionally argue that individuation in naming signaled the modern family's appreciation of children's worth.2