Why the United States has failed to establish a comprehensive high-quality child care program is the question at the center of this book. Edward Zigler has been intimately involved in this issue since the 1970s, and here he presents a firsthand history of the policy making and politics surrounding this important debate. Good-quality child care supports cognitive, social, and emotional development, school readiness, and academic achievement. This book examines the history of child care policy since 1969, including the inside story of America's one great attempt to create a comprehensive system of child care, its failure, and the lack of subsequent progress. Identifying specific issues that persist today, Zigler and his coauthors conclude with an agenda designed to lead us successfully toward quality care for America's children.

A clarion call to address this most unjust blight upon the American landscape. Madrick has provided a valuable service in presenting a highly readable and cogent argument for change.--Mark R. Rank, The Washington Post By official count, more than one out of every six American children live beneath the poverty line. But statistics alone tell little of the story. In Invisible Americans, Jeff Madrick brings to light the often invisible reality and irreparable damage of child poverty in America. Keeping his focus on the children, he examines the roots of the problem, including the toothless remnants of our social welfare system, entrenched racism, and a government unmotivated to help the most voiceless citizens. Backed by new and unambiguous research, he makes clear the devastating consequences of growing up poor: living in poverty, even temporarily, is detrimental to cognitive abilities, emotional control, and the overall health of children. The cost to society is incalculable. The inaction of politicians is unacceptable. Still, Madrick argues, there may be more reason to hope now than ever before. Rather than attempting to treat the symptoms of poverty, we might be able to ameliorate its worst effects through a single, simple, and politically feasible policy that he lays out in this impassioned and urgent call to arms.

Winner of the 2017 J. Anthony Lukas PrizeShortlisted for the 2017 Hurston/Wright Foundation AwardFinalist for the 2017 Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in JournalismLonglisted for the 2017 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Non Fiction On an average day in America, seven children and teens will be shot dead. In Another Day in the Death of America, award-winning journalist Gary Younge tells the stories of the lives lost during one such day. It could have been any day, but he chose November 23, 2013. Black, white, and Latino, aged nine to nineteen, they fell at sleepovers, on street corners, in stairwells, and on their own doorsteps. From the rural Midwest to the barrios of Texas, the narrative crisscrosses the country over a period of twenty-four hours to reveal the full human stories behind the gun-violence statistics and the brief mentions in local papers of lives lost. This powerful and moving work puts a human face-a child's face-on the "collateral damage" of gun deaths across the country. This is not a book about gun control, but about what happens in a country where it does not exist. What emerges in these pages is a searing and urgent portrait of youth, family, and firearms in America today.

A stellar group of authors from across disciplines explains the alarming increase in the use of psychotropic medications, questions the causes, and presents disturbing thoughts regarding this phenomenon and the risks it creates for children. They take an in-depth look at the conditions that have led to drugging our children, and stress how emotional, social, cultural, and physical environments can both damage and heal young minds. And they challenge the model that maintains that psychological disturbance is genetic and thus requires medication. This is riveting reading for all who care about the youngest members of society. Over the past 15 years, there has been a 300 percent increase in the use of psychotropic medications with girls and boys under the age of 20, and prescriptions for preschoolers have skyrocketed. A stellar group of authors from across disciplines explains this increase, questions the causes, and presents disturbing thoughts regarding this phenomenon as they describe the risks it creates for children. While there are certainly extreme cases where drugs are the only option, medication rather than psychotherapy and counseling has become the first choice for treatment rather than a last resort. The experts who joined forces for this book take an in-depth look at the conditions that have led to drugging our children, and stress how emotional, social, cultural, and physical environments can both damage and heal young minds. The so-called medical model, one maintaining that psychological disturbance is genetic and thus requires medication, is challenged in this volume. Contributors range from a pediatrician who has testified before Congress and been featured in a Time magazine cover story, to a top child psychiatrist who is an official for the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, along with a well-known child psychiatrist, psychologists, environmentalists, and a public policy consultant. This is riveting reading for all who care about the youngest members of society. Among other issues, this work looks at controversy over whether psychiatric medications are safe or effective for children—and what little we know about their effect on still-developing brains—as well as the role of corporate interests in the increased use of psychotropics for children. Chapters address the role of environment in both causing and curing disorders more and more often diagnosed in our youngsters: from ADHD, depression, and anxiety to eating disorders. The core questions addressed by this sage group of contributors are these: Why are so many children being diagnosed with psychiatric disturbances and given drugs? Why have drugs become the first treatment of choice to deal with those disorders?

During World War II, as women stepped in to fill jobs vacated by men in the armed services, the federal government established public child care centers in local communities for the first time. When the government announced plans to withdraw funding and terminate its child care services at the end of the war, women in California protested and lobbied to keep their centers open, even as these services rapidly vanished in other states. Analyzing the informal networks of cross-class and cross-race reformers, policymakers, and educators, Demanding Child Care: Women's Activism and the Politics of Welfare, 1940–1971 traces the rapidly changing alliances among these groups. During the early stages of the childcare movement, feminists, Communists, and labor activists banded together, only to have these alliances dissolve by the 1950s as the movement welcomed new leadership composed of working-class mothers and early childhood educators. In the 1960s, when federal policymakers earmarked child care funds for children of women on welfare and children described as culturally deprived, it expanded child care services available to these groups but eventually eliminated public child care for the working poor. Deftly exploring the possibilities for partnership as well as the limitations among these key parties, Fousekis helps to explain the barriers to a publically funded comprehensive child care program in the United States.

THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER "The seminal book on the child-separation policy." —Rachel Maddow The award-winning NBC News correspondent lays bare the full truth behind America’s systematic separation of families at the US-Mexico border. Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist | American Book Award Winner | American Bar Association's Silver Gavel Award Finalist In June 2018, Donald Trump’s most notorious decision as president had secretly been in effect for months before most Americans became aware of the astonishing inhumanity being perpetrated by their own government—the deliberate separation of migrant parents and children at U.S. border facilities. Jacob Soboroff was among the first journalists to expose this reality after seeing firsthand the living conditions of the children in custody. His influential series of reports ignited public scrutiny that contributed to the president reversing his own policy and earned Soboroff the Cronkite Award for Excellence in Political Broadcast Journalism and, with his colleagues, the 2019 Hillman Prize for Broadcast Journalism. But beyond the headlines, the complete, multilayered story lay untold. How, exactly, had such a humanitarian tragedy—now deemed “torture” by physicians—happened on American soil? Most important, what has been the human experience of those separated children and parents? Soboroff has spent the past two years reporting the many strands of this complex narrative, developing sources from within the Trump administration who share critical details for the first time. He also traces the dramatic odyssey of one separated family from Guatemala, where their lives were threatened by narcos, to seek asylum at the U.S. border, where they were separated—the son ending up in Texas, and the father thousands of miles away, in the Mojave desert of central California. And he joins the heroes who emerged to challenge the policy, and who worked on the ground to reunite parents with children. In this essential reckoning, Soboroff weaves together these key voices with his own experience covering this national issue—at the border in Texas, California, and Arizona; with administration officials in Washington, D.C., and inside the disturbing detention facilities. Separated lays out compassionately, yet in the starkest of terms, its human toll, and makes clear what is at stake as America struggles to reset its immigration policies post-Trump.

For the last forty years, J. Ronald Lally has worked with state and federal agencies to improve services for infants and toddlers in the United States and abroad. In this new book, Lally paints a stark picture of how our babies have been forced to shoulder the fallout of massive societal changes over the past 60 years—changes that have resulted in less access to their parents, longer time spent in child care, and substandard child care and services. For Our Babies features the resonant voices of American parents speaking of their hopes, worries, and frustrations living in a country with too few parental and child supports. It describes American parents’ general lack of awareness about how little they receive from their state and federal governments compared to parents living in other countries. This important book includes crucial testimony from developmental psychologists, child care providers, health and mental health professionals, economists, specialists in brain development, and early learning educators about how policy and practices must change in the United States if parents are to raise children who will become healthy, productive members of society. This book is part of the For Our Babies initiative. Visit the website, which includes an author blog, at www.forourbabies.org. J. Ronald Lally is the co-director of the Center for Child and Family Studies at WestEd, an educational research and development laboratory in San Francisco. He created the Program for Infant and Toddler Care and is one of the founders of Zero to Three: National Center for Infants, Toddlers, and Families. “Lally is right. Our economy and our society will be stronger if public policies do more to help raise healthy babies. I applaud his tireless efforts to increase national awareness about the critical importance of improving early childhood development for all families.” —U.S. Congressman George Miller (D-CA-11) “Dr. Lally’s book sensitively captures the tension in knowing that infants at birth are both full of unlimited developmental potential and at the same time desperately dependent on their surroundings. And, thankfully, it is filled with ways to act on his informed and urgent plea for action to change policy and practice.” —Carol Brunson Day, President, Brunson Phillips & Day, Inc. “Professor Lally draws on a lifetime of working with infants to review and synthesize the research about the importance of the first 3 years of life, and what babies need—especially from their relationships with parents and caregivers—to thrive developmentally and socially. He then paints a disturbing picture of how present policies are failing young children—the invisible neglect. This book is a ‘must read’ for all who care about young children and their future.” —Frank Oberklaid, Director, Centre for Community Child Health, Royal Children’s Hospital Melbourne “This is a clarion and moving call on behalf of our most vulnerable and valuable citizens, our amazing babies. It gathers together the freshest and broadest knowledge of what they need to flourish and contrasts this to the myriad ways our policies and practices consistently fail them. For Our Babies is an energizing, enlightening, and wholly loving book.” —Jeree Pawl, Clinical Pyschologist, Board of Directors, Zero to Three “Lally and others, including some of the economists cited in this book, have shown how investments in quality early education and preventive healthcare will more than pay for themselves when children reach adulthood. . . . This book is a starting place for urgently needed dialogue that will finally lead to action.” —From the Foreword by T. Berry Brazelton and Joshua Sparrow, Harvard University

“You must read this book.” —GLENN BECK, founder of The Blaze Network "A voice of reason amidst the insanity and pabulum of the current generation!" —STEVE LARGENT, NFL Hall of Fame "Dr. Piper is a dose of reality in a world of college fantasies." —JIM GARLOW, author of This Precarious Moment "Dr. Piper is one of the leading thinkers in America. Everyone should read this book." —KELLY SHACKELFORD, ESQ., president, CEO, and Chief Counsel, First Liberty Institute What has happened to the American spirit? We've gone from "Give me liberty, or give me death!" to "Take care of me, please." Our colleges were once bastions of free speech; now they're bastions of speech codes. Our culture once rewarded independence; now it rewards victimhood. Parents once taught their kids how to fend for themselves; now, any parent who tries may get a visit from the police. In Not a Day Care, Dr. Everett Piper, president of Oklahoma Wesleyan University and author of the viral essay, "This Is Not a Day Care. It's a University!," takes a hard look at what's happening around the country--including the demand for "safe spaces" and trigger warnings at universities like Yale, Brandeis, and Oberlin--and digs in his heels against the sad and dangerous infantilization of the American spirit.

Who will speak for the children? is the question posed by Judith S. Palfrey, a pediatrician and child advocate who confronts unconscionable disparities in U.S. health care—a system that persistently fails sick and disabled children despite annual expenditures of $1.8 trillion. In Child Health in America, Palfrey explores the meaning of advocacy to children's health and describes how health providers, community agencies, teachers, parents, and others can work together to bring about needed change. Palfrey presents a conceptual framework for child health advocacy consisting of four interconnected components: clinical, group, professional, and legislative. Describing each of these concepts in useful and compelling detail, she is also careful to provide examples of best practices. This original and progressive work affirms the urgent need for child advocacy and provides valuable guidance to those seeking to participate in efforts to help all children live healthier, happier lives.

This fully updated new edition of The Oxford Handbook of Infant, Toddler, and Preschool Mental Health Assessment remains the leading reference for those seeking to understand and assess mental health in infants and young children. Detailing the latest empirical research on measures and methods of infant and young child assessment and providing clinically applicable information for practitioners, this handbook takes a closer look at current developmentally based conceptualizations of mental health function and dysfunction in infants and young children as well as current and new diagnostic criteria in specific disorders such as sensory modulation dysfunction, autism spectrum disorders, affective disorders, and post-traumatic stress disorder. Presented in four sections, chapters correspond to four broad themes: contextual factors in early assessment; temperament and regulation in assessment of young children; early problems and disorders; and translation and varied applied settings for assessment. Each chapter presents state of the science information on valid, developmentally based clinical assessment and makes recommendations based on developmental theory, empirical findings, and clinical experience. Chapters have been added to this second edition covering family assessment, early care and educational environments, new approaches for distinguishing temperament from psychopathology, assessing language, and implementing second stage screening and referral. The volume recognizes and highlights the important role of developmental, social, and cultural contexts in approaching the challenge of assessing early problems and disorders. This new, updated volume will be an ideal resource for teachers, researchers, and a wide variety of clinicians and trainees including child psychologists and psychiatrists, early interventionists, and early special educators.