Product Description: In an era of increasingly patient-centered healthcare, understanding how health and illness play out in social context is vital. This volume opens a unique window on the role of play in health and wellbeing in widely varied contexts, from the work of Patch Adams as a hospital clown, to an Australian facility for dementia treatment, to a New Zealand preschool after an earthquake, to a housing complex where Irish children play near home...read more

Product Description: When players play, there is a transactional process at work, whether for children on a teeter-totter or pandas playing with peers. In this edited volume, nine experts on play show how play transactions are an important dynamic of play across cultures, age groups, even species...read more

Product Description: For children who live with a chronic illness, each day is filled with endless treatments, painful symptoms, confusion, and embarrassment. How can an eight-year old girl understand diabetes let alone explain to her schoolmates why she has to leave class to have her blood tested? How can the father of a child with asthma ever sleep soundly through the night with the fear that his son may suffocate in the next room? In In Sickness and in Play, Cindy Dell Clark tells the stories of children who suffer from two common illnesses that are often underestimated by those not directly touched by them-asthma and diabetes...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy--is there still a place for these imaginary creatures in today's skeptical society? More importantly, is it appropriate to encourage children to believe in these myths? In Flights of Fancy, Leaps of Faith, Cindy Dell Clark went straight to children and their parents for the answers. Using their insights, she offers fresh, new interpretations of the cultural and psychological roles these figures play in children's lives. Complete with children's vivid testimonies and colorful illustrations, this book is a revealing journey into a child's mind and world."A very enjoyable read, this book is a seriously researched record of children's myths, written with the observant accuracy of an anthropologist."--Nadja Reissland, Common Knowledge"Clark posits some novel interpretations as well as intriguing glimpses for parents, teachers, and psychologists into the ways children shape our culture rather than merely being passive inheritors of it."--Booklist