Children and Childhood in Our Contemporary Societies/edited by Deepak Kumar Behera. 1998, 274 p., $30.
Contents: 1. Children and childhood in our contemporary societies: an introduction/Deepak Kumar Behera. 2. The social structuration of childhood: an essay on childhood and society/Ivar Frones. 3. The need for monitoring and measuring young children's well-being/Asher Ben-Arieh. 4. The separative view - is there any scientific Approach to children/Doris Buhler-Niederberger. 5. Our children are missing: on the recent appearence of childhood as a research topic/Brian Strand Milne. 6. Consumer culture and children's identities/Lucia Rabello De Castro. 7. Childhood and social space: examples from the UK/Chris Jenks. 8. Children in cyber environment/Greta Dermendjieva. 9. Studying children as social actors: a new programme of childhood research in the UK/Alan Prout. 10. Rationales for early childhood development programmes/Helen Penn. 11. Detained with their mothers: psychological implication for the child/Phillip D. Jaffe, Francisco Pons and Helene Rey Wicky. 12. Understanding, wisdom and rights: assessing children's competence/Priscilla Alderson. 13. United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child: relevance for indigenous children/Cynthia Price Cohen. 14. Family, identity, and children's rights: notes on children and young people outside the family/Andrew West. 15. Violence, children's rights and childhood politics/Heinz Sunker. 16. The rights of the child in Bulgaria: myth and reality/Viara Gurova. 17. Children and the criminal justice in South Africa/Johan Prinsloo. Appendix. Index.
"The volume emphasizes that we should begin to rethink our approaches to children and the issues relating to them in various contexts in our contemporary societies. This rethinking, a gesture of cognitive and political correctness, is consequent upon our understanding on childhood issues. The flaws, as will be apparent from the articles in the volume, consist mostly in the fact that the construction of childhood and its related issues as social categories of knowledge are the monopoly of the adults. This volume thus seeks to rectify the flaws by highlighting the basic disagreement between children's perspectives on their own lives and that of the adults on children's lives. What it tries to do is the reconstruction of childhood specifically through children's notion of self-identity. The volume underpins the ideas that children must be regarded as social actors and their rights must be based on the views they themselves have on various issues and conditions that affect them. Some contributors to the volume critically examine various approaches to childhood research. Topics investigated by the contributors are: childhood research, children's well-being, children's identity, childhood and social space, children as social actors, children in cyber environment, children with special problems, children's competency, children's rights, childhood politics, children and criminal justice, etc. The volume is important both for analytical and policy related reasons." (jacket)
[Deepak Kumar Behera also edited Contemporary Society : Childhood and Complex Order and Contemporary Society : Tribal Studies.]