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This book, the first of three volumes that will provide the most complete documentary history of public provision for American children, traces the changing attitudes of the nation toward youth during the first two and one half centuries of its history.
Collecting a vast array of selections from past and present--from colonial ministers to Drs. Benjamin Spock and T. Berry Brazelton, and from the poems of Anne Bradstreet to the writings of today's young people--this volume brings to light central issues relevant to American children. The 178 contributions explore a variety of topics connected with childbirth and infancy, adolescence and youth, discipline, working children, learning, children without parents, the vulnerable child, sexuality, the child and the state, and the child's world. Editors Fass (history) and Mason (social welfare) are both associated with the University of California at Berkeley. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Examining the aspects of childhood in the American colonies between the late 16th and late 18th centuries, this text contains essays and documents that shed light on the ways in which the process of colonisation shaped childhood, and in turn how the experience of children affected life in colonial America.
As we approach the year 2000, infant mortality rates, child placement dilemmas, and appropriate socialization of children continue to challenge the field of child welfare. It is thus especially significant to reflect on the history of child welfare. The carefully selected topics explored in this volume underscore the importance of recovering past events and themes still relevant. It is the aim of this volume to illumine current issues by a review of past struggles and problems. A History of Child Welfare offers many examples of practices that have direct import for those who struggle to support children. Who is not bothered by what seem to be increasing acts of violence by children against children? The role of hidden cruelty to children in perpetuating violence is illuminated by studying the past. Historians and social researchers have gone far in examining the family, and by implication, their revelations greatly increase society's complex responses to children over time from early assumptions that children were little more than miniature adults to the discovery of childhood as a special developmental period. At the start of this century women still did not have universal suffrage and brutal child labor was not unusual. Harsh legal codes separating the races were widespread, and those bent on improving the lot of children knew that reform meant commitment to an uphill struggle. By the end of the century, much has changed: child labor, while still present, has been outlawed in most industries, women vote and hold many high offices; and de jure racial segregation is largely a memory. Yet the state of children remains precarious, with poverty a persistent theme throughout the century. The fifteen articles in this volume cover a wide range of social conditions, public policies, and approaches to problem solving. Though history does not repeat itself precisely, problems, controversies about solutions, and certain themes do. A History of Child Welfare takes up social and economic conditions that correlate with increasing rates of child abuse and neglect, and an increasing number of children in out-of-home care. This volume distinguishes approaches that have been useful from those that have failed. In this way, these serious reflections help build on past successes and avoid previous errors.
Uprooting has to do with one of the fundamental properties of human life-the need to change-and with the personal and societal mecha nisms for dealing with that need. As with the more general problems of change, uprooting can be a time of human disaster and desolation, or a time of adaptation and growth into new capacities. The special quality of uprooting is that the need to change is faced at a time of separation from accustomed social, cultural, and environ mental support systems. It is this separation from familiar supports that either renders the uprooted vulnerable to the destructive conse quences of change, or creates freedoms for their evolution into new and constructive patterns of life. Whether the outcomes will be destruc tive or constructive will be determined by the forces at work: the nature and power of the uprooting forces versus the personal and societal capacities for coping with them. Uprooting events are so widespread as to be compared with the major rites of life, but with the difference that dislocation is involved. Uprooting reaches from self-imposed movements such as rural-to urban migration, running away, and traveling abroad for schooling, to natural and man-made disasters such as earthquakes, political oppres sion, and war. The impacts vary from the need to adapt to. a new culture for an interim period of study to the desolating consequences of the total loss of family, friends, home, and country.
""Is this intervention effective?" This is a question that social workers have asked themselves since the birth of the profession and which social welfare agents have asked since the birth of our country. In our attempts at advancing the social welfare of the client and society, it is essential that we constantly evaluate the impact of our interventions. Over the years, however, the above question has yielded some surprising answers. During the Colonial era, those individuals suffering from mental illness who demonstrated a proclivity for aberrant and sometimes harmful behaviors were locked away in barns or small rooms. During the late 1800s in New York City, social welfare agents organized the orphan trains, sending poor immigrant children-many who were not orphans-out to the more "wholesome" environment of family farms in the Midwest. In the 1950s, social workers placed themselves in the role of social police by conducting midnight 'raids' (i.e. unscheduled visits at midnight) at the homes of welfare recipients to ensure that welfare mothers were not benefiting from a man's company in secret, and thus, disqualifying themselves from receiving aid. Looking upon these interventions with our present eyes, from a viewpoint firmly grounded in notions of self-determination and empowerment, our profession can easily see the moral failings of these interventions. From these examples, as a profession we are able to note that simply applying good intentions-by themselves-are not adequate to ensure effective and worthy interventions. We are also able to note that simply having an outcome measure is not enough to ensure the worthiness of an intervention, as the examples above contained easily measured outcomes"--