This project offers a close look into the meaning-making practices of the Bulgarian socialist state with regard to the conception and enactment of childhood. Held for the first time in 1979, on occasion of the UN declared "International Year of the Child", the International Children's Assembly "Banner of Peace" emerges as a…

Professional advocacy organizations are often challenged by the question of their authentic community representation and their ability to balance short-term pragmatism with strategic plans for long-term, systemic change. Coleman Advocates, one of the nation's most effective child advocacy organizations, has taken up this challenge under the…

Advocacy on behalf of children is most efficient when a group analyzes the problems confronting children and then decides how it can be most effective in a way that is most comfortable for its members. [Available from JCSI, 119 West 24th Street, New York, New York 10011]. (AM)

The Parent Leadership Program team that created and facilitated a Local Liaison Learning Group between September 1998 and November 1999 gathered in mid-January 2000 to discuss what they had learned. The Learning Group was thought of by the Parent Leadership Program team as an applied research setting for investigating the conditions that support…

Due to urbanization and the information explosion, children today grow up under entirely different conditions than they did only 70 to 80 years ago. Now, families have less opportunity than before to communicate their culture to their children. Rather, the images children see on television programs intended for adults influence the picture they…

This report proposes a new national strategy to prevent child abuse and neglect. Four components of the proposed strategy are that it be: (1) comprehensive; (2) neighborhood-based; (3) child-centered; and (4) family-focused. Specific elements of the strategy include: (1) strengthening neighborhoods; (2) reorienting the delivery of human services;…

In North Carolina, legislation giving health insurance to children of modest-income working families was won because a broad coalition of over 100 organizations got the attention of lawmakers. Because all children benefitted, rural children benefited, but a few groups pushing for health insurance for just rural children would not have gotten their…

Federal and state tax laws and most private programs give funding to all parents who put their children in day care but give nothing to parents who cut back on their work hours to care for their own children. Challenging the conventional wisdom about child care, this book argues that Americans have wrongly embraced day care and devalued work that…

Over the last generation, parents have felt more and more intimidated by child care "experts" and have increasingly surrendered their role as the primary educators of their children. On the premise that theories of development, often colored by ideological positions on the family and its function in society, should take a back seat to…

Noting that successful social policies for children are critical to our nation's future, this book discusses the status of children in America and suggests that the nation's current policies may not be serving them well. Proposals for seven new social policies are discussed that deal with the following domains affecting children from birth through…

Designed for youth workers, teachers, counselors, and student organizers, 11 essays in this handbook examine issues concerned with children's rights. "Children's Rights and Social Work" proposes that social workers can speed and direct the process of change by advocating the rights of young people and by providing services to make those rights a…