A crucial contemporary dynamic around children and young people in the Global North is the multiple ways that have emerged to monitor their development, behaviour and character. In particular disabled children or children with unusual developmental patterns can find themselves surrounded by multiple practices through which they are examined.This rich book draws on a wide range of qualitative research to look at how disabled children have been cared for, treated and categorised. Nar...

A revolutionary book that offers a fresh, bold approach to confronting the juvenile crime epidemic With the rise of violent crimes committed by teenagers in recent years, heated discussion has arisen over the societal factors that lead to juvenile criminality and the ways that public institutions are failing to curtail them. Now a team of experts with decades of collective hands-on experience present a book that cuts through the hype and paranoia to offer real solutions. Drawing on actual ...

Liza Long,the author of “I Am Adam Lanza’s Mother"—as seen in the HBO® documentary A Dangerous Son—speaks out about mental illness.Like most of the nation, Liza Long spent December 14, 2012, mourning the victims of the Newtown shooting. As the mother of a child with a mental illness, however, she also wondered: “What if my son does that someday?”The emotional response she posted on her blog went viral, putting Long at the center of a passionate con...

The title of this collection of essays, Sex and Disability, unites two terms that the popular imagination often regards as incongruous. The major texts in sexuality studies, including queer theory, rarely mention disability, and foundational texts in disability studies do not discuss sex in much detail. What if "sex" and "disability" were understood as intimately related concepts? And what if disabled people were seen as both subjects and objects of a range of erotic desires and p...

Movie stars, entertainers, game-show hosts, jugglers, plate-spinners, gospel choirs, corporate executives posing with over-sized checks, household name-brand products, smiling children in leg braces-all were fixtures of the phenomenon that defined American culture in the second half of the twentieth century: the telethon. Hundreds of millions watched these weekend-long variety shows that raised billions of dollars for disability-related charities. Drawing on over two decades of in-depth re...

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities is the only UN treaty to date in which the people who are its target, that is disabled people, were actively involved in its drafting and the only one which requires the active participation of disabled people in its implementation. This does not, of course, automatically guarantee the direct participation of all disabled people. This is especially so for children with disabilities, whose status as legal minors may in...

Our children mean the world to us. They are so central to our hopes and dreams that we will do almost anything to keep them healthy, happy, and safe. What happens, then, when a child has serious problems? In Family Trouble, a compelling portrait of upheaval in family life, sociologist Ara Francis tells the stories of middle-class men and women whose children face significant medical, psychological, and social challenges.Francis interviewed the mothers and fathers of childr...

Handicapped? Wanting to do good works for others anyway?Too busy to add good works to your already cluttered life?What do you say when a friend’s relative dies?Wonder how to handle gossip, baby showers, mean bosses, etc. in the work place?Do the poor in other countries bother you?Want to teach your children to do good deeds?Every possible type of good work is included in this book, along with step-by-step methods. Somet...

Sibling Identity and Relationships explores the special place that siblings occupy in the lives of children and young people, providing new insights into sibling identity and relationships. Drawing on social constructionist and psychodynamic perspectives, it discusses who constitutes a sibling, emotional connections and separations, conflict and aggression and how siblings construct and conduct their relationship out of the home, at school and in local communities.Shedding...

Teen suicide has long been considered one of society’s darkest secrets; the idea of troubled young people driven to take their own lives was a tragedy too horrible to contemplate, let alone talk about openly. But the fact remains that teen suicide is an issue that refuses to go away so long as young people in crisis have nowhere to turn. But now, in this age of frank discussions about bullying, peer pressure, and issues of "difference," there is a growing sense that teen suicide is no long...

Disabled children’s lives have often been discussed through medical concepts of disability rather than concepts of childhood. Western understandings of childhood have defined disabled children against child development ‘norms’ and have provided the rationale for segregated or ‘special’ welfare and education provision. In contrast, disabled children’s childhood studies begins with the view that studies of children’s impairment are not studies of their childhoods. Disabled children’s childho...