Product Description: Early childhood education and care has become a central policy concern in many countries, and as services expand it is crucial to examine whether children from disadvantaged backgrounds receive equitable services. In An Equal Start? experts from eight countries—the United States, the United Kingdom, Norway, France, the Netherlands, Germany, New Zealand, and Australia—examine how early education and care is organized, funded, and regulated in their respective countries...read more

Product Description: Addressing the disparity in test scores between black and white children remains one of the greatest social challenges of our time. Between the 1960s and 1980s, tremendous strides were made in closing the achievement gap, but that remarkable progress halted abruptly in the mid 1980s, and stagnated throughout the 1990s...read more

Product Description: Using data from the first 2 phases of the NICHD Study of Early Child Care, we examine the links between maternal employment in the first 12 months of life and cognitive, social, and emotional outcomes for children at age 3, at age 4 ...read more

What do children need to grow and develop? And how can their needs be met when parents work? Emphasizing the importance of parental choice, quality of care, and work opportunities, economist Jane Waldfogel guides readers through the maze of social science research evidence to offer comprehensive answers and a vision for change. Drawing on the evidence, Waldfogel proposes a bold new plan to better meet the needs of children in working families, from birth through adolescence, while respecting the core values of choice, quality, and work: Allow parents more flexibility to take time off work for family responsibilities; Break the link between employment and essential family benefits; Give mothers and fathers more options to stay home in the first year of life; Improve quality of care from infancy through the preschool years; Increase access to high-quality out-of-school programs for school-aged children and teenagers.

Product Description: More than ever, the economic health of a country depends upon the skills, knowledge, and capacities of its people. How does a person acquire these human assets and how can we promote their development? Securing the Future assembles an interdisciplinary team of scholars to investigate the full range of factors—pediatric, psychological, social, and economic—that bear on a child's development into a well-adjusted, economically productive member of society...read more

Analyzes the present child protective services system in the United States by discussing the role of parents, the scope of government intervention, and the nature of government inverventions. (view table of contents)