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This book examines in detail children's play within public policy. Using the UK government's Play Strategy for England (2008-10) as a detailed case study, it explores states' obligations to children under the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and the General Comment of 2013. It presents evidence that strategies for public health, education and even environmental sustainability would be more effective with a better-informed perspective about the nature of play and the imporance of allowing children more time and space for it.

This book uses the concept of exploration as a way of understanding transitions in children between the ages of 5 to 18 years old. Written by an international group of scholars from Australia, Brazil, China, Denmark, Finland, Greenland, India, Norway and the UK, the chapters offer a diverse set of case studies. The topics and themes covered include transitions in outdoor playtime, the transition to daycare, compassion in kindergarten, learning with fathers, transitions of Chinese traditional culture and disability. The chapters are organised into two parts, the first part covering macro transitions and the second covering micro-genetic transitions. The contributors show how both macro and micro-genetic transitions influence children's everyday lives, and how these different transitions open up new possibilities for play, learning and development. The contributors draw on Vygotsky's cultural historical theory and the understanding that children's cultural formation takes form in a dialectic relation between children's interests and motives and the institutional settings they participate in.

LIVES ACROSS TIME describes a 30-year study of 76 individuals from birth to adulthood. The book narrates their varied life paths and the influence of their families and communities on their development. We place the results into the categories of those whose lives are fairly continuous from early childhood, and those whose lives are not; those whose lives exceeded expectations in the face of early troubled parenting, and those who did not fulfill the promise of initially sound parenting and healthy emotional growth – typically because of subsequent trauma – and developed psychiatric syndromes. While life histories may fall into configurations with shared characteristics, by listening psychoanalytically we found something basic in the stories that parents and their now adult children tell about themselves: the individual story is humanizing and compelling. Letting the subjects speak at length brought them alive for us as researchers. There was a sense of awe in watching the children’s inner worlds evolve over time. By narrating the participants’ own voices we hope to share the wonder we experienced so the reader’s journey also becomes one of discovery.

* Each case includes discussion questions and research and classroom activities, allowing students to further examine the issues presented in the case * Matrix organizes cases by subject′s socio-economic level, ethnic background, gender, etc., allowing instructors and readers to pinpoint the most relevant cases for their study * \"Connecting Across Cases\" feature poses questions that encourage students to consider developmental issues in two or more cases * Cases cover the full range of development, from ages 4 to 18, which mirrors the range covered in most child and adolescent development courses and texts.

Drawing on interview data, the authors describe K-3 students' knowledge and thinking about basic aspects of the social world that are addressed in the elementary social studies curriculum. The interviews focused on human activities relating to nine cultural universals that are commonly addressed in the elementary social studies curriculum: food, clothing, shelter, communication, transportation, family living, childhood, money, and government. This volume synthesizes findings from the research and discusses their implications for curriculum and instruction in early social studies. Children's Thinking About Cultural Universals significantly expands the knowledge base on developments in children's social knowledge and thinking and, in addition, provides a wealth of information to inform social studies educators' and curriculum developers' efforts to match instruction to students' prior knowledge, both by building on already developed valid knowledge and by addressing common misconceptions. It represents a quantum leap in the availability of information on the trajectories of children's knowledge about common topics in primary elementary social studies education. Contents: Introduction. Food. Clothing. Shelter. Communication. Transportation. Family Living. Government. Money and Childhood. Variation Across Socioeconomic Status, Achievement Level, and Gender. Overall Trends in the Findings and Their Implications for Early Social Studies.

Volunteering improves inner character, builds community, cures poverty, and prevents crime. We've all heard this kind of empowerment talk from nonprofit and government-sponsored civic programs. But what do these programs really accomplish? InMaking Volunteers, Nina Eliasoph offers an in-depth, humorous, wrenching, and at times uplifting look inside youth and adult civic programs. She reveals an urgent need for policy reforms in order to improve these organizations and shows that while volunteers learn important lessons, they are not always the lessons that empowerment programs aim to teach. With short-term funding and a dizzy mix of mandates from multiple sponsors, community programs develop a complex web of intimacy, governance, and civic life. Eliasoph describes the at-risk youth served by such programs, the college-bound volunteers who hope to feel selfless inspiration and plump up their resumés, and what happens when the two groups are expected to bond instantly through short-term projects. She looks at adult \"plug-in\" volunteers who, working in after-school programs and limited by time, hope to become like beloved aunties to youth. Eliasoph indicates that adult volunteers can provide grassroots support but they can also undermine the family-like warmth created by paid organizers. Exploring contradictions between the democratic rhetoric of empowerment programs and the bureaucratic hurdles that volunteers learn to navigate, the book demonstrates that empowerment projects work best with less precarious funding, more careful planning, and mandatory training, reflection, and long-term commitments from volunteers. Based on participant research inside civic and community organizations,Making Volunteersillustrates what these programs can and cannot achieve, and how to make them more effective.

The genetics of autism The autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) are a group of conditions typically characterized by repetitive behaviour, severely restricted interests and difficulties with social interactions and communication. ASDs are highly heritable, yet the underlying genetic determinants remain largely unknown. A genome-wide analysis reveals that people with ASDs carry a higher load of rare copy-number variants — segments of DNA for which the copy number differs between individual genomes — which are either inherited or arise de novo . The results implicate several novel genes as ASD candidates and point to the importance of cellular proliferation, projection and motility as well as specific signalling pathways in this disorder. The autistic spectrum disorders (ASDs) are highly heritable, yet the underlying genetic determinants remain largely unknown. Here, a genome-wide analysis of rare copy number variants (CNVs) has been carried out, revealing that ASD sufferers carry a higher load of rare, genic CNVs than do controls. Many of these CNVs are de novo and inherited. The results implicate several novel genes in ASDs, and point to the importance of cellular proliferation, projection and motility, as well as specific signalling pathways, in these disorders. The autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) are a group of conditions characterized by impairments in reciprocal social interaction and communication, and the presence of restricted and repetitive behaviours 1 . Individuals with an ASD vary greatly in cognitive development, which can range from above average to intellectual disability 2 . Although ASDs are known to be highly heritable (∼90%) 3 , the underlying genetic determinants are still largely unknown. Here we analysed the genome-wide characteristics of rare (<1% frequency) copy number variation in ASD using dense genotyping arrays. When comparing 996 ASD individuals of European ancestry to 1,287 matched controls, cases were found to carry a higher global burden of rare, genic copy number variants (CNVs) (1.19 fold, P = 0.012), especially so for loci previously implicated in either ASD and/or intellectual disability (1.69 fold, P = 3.4 × 10 -4 ). Among the CNVs there were numerous de novo and inherited events, sometimes in combination in a given family, implicating many novel ASD genes such as SHANK2, SYNGAP1 , DLGAP2 and the X-linked DDX53–PTCHD1 locus. We also discovered an enrichment of CNVs disrupting functional gene sets involved in cellular proliferation, projection and motility, and GTPase/Ras signalling. Our results reveal many new genetic and functional targets in ASD that may lead to final connected pathways.