The nation's child protection system (CPS) has historically focused on preventing maltreatment in high-risk families, whose children have already been maltreated. But, as Jane Waldfogel explains, it has also begun developing prevention procedures for children at lower risk--those who are referred to CPS but whose cases do not meet the criteria for…

Valerie Lee and Douglas Ready explore the influences of the high school curriculum on student learning and the equitable distribution of that learning by race and socioeconomic status. They begin by tracing the historical development of the U.S. comprehensive high school and then examine the curricular reforms of the past three decades. During the…

Noting that the social and emotional experiences of American children today often heavily involve electronic media, Barbara Wilson takes a close look at how exposure to screen media affects children's well-being and development. She concludes that media influence on children depends more on the type of content that children find attractive than on…

American youth are awash in media. They have television sets in their bedrooms, personal computers in their family rooms, and digital music players and cell phones in their backpacks. They spend more time with media than any single activity other than sleeping, with the average American eight- to eighteen-year-old reporting more than six hours of…

Electronic media, particularly television, have long been criticized for their potential impact on children. One area for concern is how early media exposure influences cognitive development and academic achievement. Heather Kirkorian, Ellen Wartella, and Daniel Anderson summarize the relevant research and provide suggestions for maximizing the…

Marie Evans Schmidt and Elizabeth Vandewater review research on links between various types of electronic media and the cognitive skills of school-aged children and adolescents. One central finding of studies to date, they say, is that the content delivered by electronic media is far more influential than the media themselves. Most studies, they…

Over the past decade, technology has become increasingly important in the lives of adolescents. As a group, adolescents are heavy users of newer electronic communication forms such as instant messaging, e-mail, and text messaging, as well as communication-oriented Internet sites such as blogs, social networking, and sites for sharing photos and…

Liliana Escobar-Chaves and Craig Anderson investigate two important trends among American youth and examine the extent to which the two trends might be related. First, the authors note that U.S. youth are spending increasing amounts of time using electronic media, with the average American youngster now spending one-third of each day with some…

Media-related commercial marketing aimed at promoting the purchase of products and services by children, and by adults for children, is ubiquitous and has been associated with negative health consequences such as poor nutrition and physical inactivity. But, as Douglas Evans points out, not all marketing in the electronic media is confined to the…

Marketing and advertising support the U.S. economy by promoting the sale of goods and services to consumers, both adults and children. Sandra Calvert addresses product marketing to children and shows that although marketers have targeted children for decades, two recent trends have increased their interest in child consumers. First, both the…

Amy Jordan addresses the need to balance the media industry's potentially important contributions to the healthy development of America's children against the consequences of excessive and age-inappropriate media exposure. Much of the philosophical tension regarding how much say the government should have about media content and delivery stems…

Elizabeth Scott and Laurence Steinberg explore the dramatic changes in the law's conception of young offenders between the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twenty-first. At the dawn of the juvenile court era, they note, most youths were tried and punished as if they were adults. Early juvenile court reformers argued strongly…

The dual requirement to ensure community safety and promote a youthful offender's positive development permeates policy and frames daily practice in juvenile justice. Balancing those two demands, explain Edward Mulvey and Anne-Marie Iselin, requires justice system professionals at all levels to make extremely difficult decisions about the likely…

For many years, notes Alex Piquero, youth of color have been overrepresented at every stage of the U.S. juvenile justice system. As with racial disparities in a wide variety of social indicators, the causes of these disparities are not immediately apparent. Some analysts attribute the disparities to "differential involvement"--that is, to…

Rising juvenile crime rates during the 1970s and 1980s spurred state legislatures across the country to exclude or transfer a significant share of offenders under the age of eighteen to the jurisdiction of the criminal court, essentially redrawing the boundary between the juvenile and adult justice systems. Jeffrey Fagan examines the legal…