Departments

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children

  • SOURCE: The Conversation
    7/6/2023

    In Post-Soviet Russia, Children Have Been Propaganda Instruments

    by Clementine Fujimura

    Russian regimes since the fall of Communism have inherited and created crises of mass orphanage; their policy responses to parentless children have been informed by politics and nationalism at the expense of child welfare. Removal of orphans from Ukraine to Russia is just the latest instance. 

  • SOURCE: Washington Post
    4/27/2023

    Authors Call for a Rethink of Birth and Motherhood

    Peggy O'Donnell Heffington makes an assertive argument that the United States has a long history of official involvement in motherhood, from making reproduction near-compulsory for white women on one side of the color line to eugenics and sterilization on the other. 

  • 10/18/2020

    Fraught Family Reunification After the Holocaust

    by Rebecca Clifford

    "A tenth of Europe's pre-war population of Jewish children survived the Holocaust. Many sought and achieved reunification with their families, but reunification did not usually end the trauma endured by this "fragment of an entire generation."

  • SOURCE: Made By History at The Washington Post
    8/27/2020

    Qanon Misdirects Our Attention Away From The Real Threats To Children

    by Paul M. Renfro

    "Moral panics like QAnon work to distract from less outrageous, far more insidious sources of harm. Even worse, they contribute to punitive policies that separate and hurt families, perpetuate mass incarceration and keep people in a state of fear."

  • SOURCE: The New Yorker
    5/11/2020

    How We Got to Sesame Street

    by Jill Lepore

    The beloved children's program grew from the need to use the overabundance of televisions to fix the dearth of preschools in 1960s America. Jill Lepore assesses how the show has changed along with society.

  • 1/26/20

    Modeling Grief: the Death of Children in Historical Perspective

    by Maria E. Doerfler

    As students of the history of emotions have argued, even the deepest and most primal feelings require models for experiencing one's own suffering and for responding appropriately to others’. The relative lack of such models in contemporary American society contrasts sharply with other eras' approach to voicing bereavement.

  • 6/23/19

    Why We Need Better Children's History Books

    by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

    Assembling a coherent narrative that inspires students to image a different world is much more complicated than a Wikipedia search. Teachers can only carry out this task if they have access to narrative histories that are decolonized.

  • 4/22/18

    Children Are At Risk. Why Aren’t We Doing More?

    by Molly Ladd-Taylor and Kriste Lindenmeyer

    100 years ago Woodrow Wilson launched a federal initiative to improve children’s health and welfare. He called it Children’s Year. It’s time for another.

  • SOURCE: NYT
    5-31-14

    The Wild Children of Yesteryear

    by Jon Grinspan

    Parents back then encouraged kids to get some wildness out of their system, to express the republic’s revolutionary values.

  • SOURCE: Salon
    6-22-13

    Jonathan Zimmerman: Children are Sexual Creatures

    Jonathan Zimmerman is a professor of education and history at New York University. He is the author of Small Wonder: The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory and three other books. In 1985, the founder of modern American sex education gave a controversial speech about erections in fetuses. To Mary Calderone, who had started the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States back in 1964, new evidence about arousal in male fetuses demonstrated once and for all that children were sexual beings.Nonsense, said conservatives. To critics of sex education, childhood was — or should be — a time of sexual innocence. Racy movies, TV shows and magazines made kids prematurely interested in sex. And so did sex education, which robbed them of their natural virtue and replaced it with tawdry thoughts and feelings.I thought of this debate as I read the comments by Rep. Michael Burgess, R-Texas, during the House debate on Monday over a bill that would ban almost all abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy. According to Burgess, fetuses do not simply experience sexual arousal; they actively arouse themselves.