In the "His Dark Materials" trilogy, Pullman reworks the fall of humanity into an ascent and suggests that ascent into adulthood through sexual experience is the desired goal for children. Although this ascent is accompanied by a radical reconceptualization of life and death, Pullman fails to offer any genuinely new ideas of the world with respect…

Reviews concerns that college students expressed about sibling relationships in open-ended questions submitted for class discussions. Some questions suggested the relevance of quasi-parental role performance, and others suggested the effect of subgroup and gang formation on family power distribution in the family. (JAC)

As a result of the growth in out-of-wedlock childbearing and union instability, adults contemplating forming a new union are often already parents. This article examines the role of children in stepfamily formation, both coresident and not, using the 2,594 respondents in the National Survey of Families and Households who were not living with a…

Children at risk for early reading difficulties were identified on entry into kindergarten, and half of these children received small-group intervention two to three times a week during their kindergarten year. The other half received whatever remedial assistance was offered by their home schools. These children were again assessed at the…

This article presents an emergent conceptual model of childhood adultification and economic disadvantage derived from 5 longitudinal ethnographies of children and adolescents growing up in low-income families. Childhood adultification involves contextual, social, and developmental processes in which youth are prematurely, and often…

Children face many important changes in the first eight years of life, including different learning centres, social groups, roles and expectations. Their ability to adapt to such a dynamic and evolving environment directly affects their sense of identity and status within their community over the short and long term. In particular, the key turning…

Understanding children's experience is increasingly a key purpose of much educational research. In contrast to traditional approaches to the study of children that emphasized the socialization of children through various stages of development, researchers within the social constructionism perspective begin with an insistence that childhood is a…

A home economics teacher tells how she rearranged her furniture at home to improve her time management and also taught her three-year-old daughter to do some home chores. (MF)

The new paradigm of studying childhood that has emerged in the past 15 years has significant implications for rethinking research with children. This article examines some methodological and ethical issues related to the role and responsibility of a researcher in the process of designing, structuring, and conducting research on childhood…

Presents a child-centered, developmental conference model for implementation with mildly handicapped, normal, or gifted children in preschools and elementary schools. Techniques for assisting children's participation are related to each conference step. (RH)

Examines the effects of television on children and asserts that its most serious consequence may be the erosion of the dividing line between childhood and adulthood. (APM)

Television erases the dividing line between childhood and adulthood because it requires no instruction to grasp its form and because it does not segregate its audience. Television creates a population in which everyone is fixed at an age somewhere between 20 and 30. (Author/IRT)

Reevaluates Lev Vygotsky's theory of children's development. Argues that we can understand development as history only when we think simultaneously about how changing contexts affect what children appropriate from them, and how children's appropriations modify the contexts that guide development. (JPB)