Childhood and Youth Studies

What do the best youth arts programs look like, and how can young people develop through them? This groundbreaking book highlights the conditions needed for youth arts work to be successful, using six international, best practice case studies.

Co-authored by an international team of experts across disciplines, this important book is one of the first to demonstrate the enormous benefit creative methods offer for education research. It illustrates how using creative methods, such as poetic inquiry, theatre and animation, can support learning and illuminate participation and engagement.

This book explores what happened to the 'Romanian orphans' of the 1990s, including those who stayed in institutions as well as those who were fostered and adopted domestically and internationally. Looking in detail at their experiences, the book provides valuable new evidence on what is important for children in care today.

Drawing on interviews with key international informants across 16 countries, this book examines how child support systems often fail to transfer payments from separated fathers to mothers and their children. It identifies how the gender order is entrenched through child support failure and offers possibilities for feminist reform.

Drawing on the findings of a two-year European research project, this book presents a new model for responding meaningfully and effectively the 'problem' of how to respond to violence involving young people that continues to challenge youth workers and policy makers.

This book examines how pathologising ideas of failing, chaotic and dysfunctional families create a powerful consensus that Britain is in the grip of a ‘parent crisis’ and are used to justify increasingly punitive state policies.

Harry Hendrick shows how broader social changes, including neoliberalism, feminism, the collapse of the social-democratic ideal, and the 'new behaviourism', have led to the rise of the anxious and narcissistic parent, In this provocative history of parenting.

Offering a fresh look to complement the dominant singular voice of developmental psychology, this unique collection of 12 research projects carried out in the UK and USA is essential reading for anyone studying or working with children at play.

Following 5 years of systemic research exploring the efficacy and impact of Sure Start Local Programmes, this book pulls together, in a single volume, the results of the extensive National Evaluation of Sure Start (NESS). 

This book explores diversity and complexity in fathering through psychoanalysis, sociology and psychology and analyses contemporary developments in social policies and welfare practices. Using a feminist perspective, it highlights the opportunities and dangers in contemporary developments for those wishing to advance gender equity.

This book examines fathers' perceptions of their domestic violence and its impact on children, their relationships with children and their parenting practices. It is the first UK book to specifically focus on violent fathering, discussing original research in the context of domestic violence and emerging practice literature to address this problem.

This book examines the nature and meaning of 'empowerment' in the child welfare context using the family group conference approach to decision making in child welfare and protection. The authors evaluate the FGC approach so that current practice can be improved and lessons learned for other areas of work with children and families.