Showing results by publisher "Tantor Media" in Children's Studies

In 1902, Morris and Rose Michtom invented the Teddy Bear in the back room of their Brooklyn candy store. Together they launched the Ideal Toy Corporation, joining a set of other poor, first-generation Jewish toymakers. Playmakers reveals how the toy industry created the idealized American childhood: an enchanted world, full of wild creatures and eternal struggles between good and evil, with endless realms of fantasy and beauty.

All forms of recreational digital consumption—whether on smartphones, tablets, game consoles, or TVs—have skyrocketed in the younger generations. Most media experts do not seem overly concerned about this situation: children are adaptable, they say, they are "digital natives," their brains have changed and screens make them smarter. But other specialists—including some pediatricians, psychiatrists, teachers, and speech therapists—dispute these claims, and many parents worry about the long-term consequences of their children's intensive exposure to screens.

Our children's first digital footprints are made before they can walk-even before they are born - as parents use fertility apps to aid conception, post ultrasound images, and share their baby's hospital mug shot. Then, in rapid succession come terabytes of baby pictures stored in the cloud, digital baby monitors with built-in artificial intelligence, and real-time updates from daycare. Unwittingly, parents, teachers, and other trusted adults are compiling digital dossiers for children that could be available to everyone - friends, employers, law enforcement - forever.

During the civil war that ravaged Sierra Leone from 1991 to 2002, an estimated 20,000 children were forced to join the fighting. As villages were raided and youths rounded up, it was not uncommon for a child to be ordered to kill a friend, relative, or neighbor. The goal was to make it impossible for the captives to return home and be accepted back into their communities. Betancourt's study provides insight into the long-term psychological and developmental effects of family separation, war, and exposure to violence.

The Promise of Youth Anti-citizenship argues that Black youth and youth of color have been cast as anti-citizens, disenfranchised from the social, political, and economic mainstream of American life. Instead of asking youth to conform to a larger societal structure undergirded by racial capitalism and antiblackness, the volume's contributors propose that the collective practice of anti-citizenship opens up a liberatory space for youth to challenge the social order.

Children are not passive victims of oppression, but their resistance and struggle for equality has been largely ignored by the wider social justice movement—until now. In this groundbreaking manifesto, Eloise Rickman argues that it's time to stop viewing children as less than adults and start fighting for their rights to be taken seriously. Radical, compassionate, and profoundly hopeful, this powerful new book signals the start of a long-overdue conversation about how we treat children. It's Not Fair is a call to embrace children’s liberation and the possibility of a better, fairer world.

Focusing on the lived experience of campers and camp counselors, The Jews of Summer demonstrates how a cultural crisis birthed a rite of passage that remains a significant influence in American Jewish life.