{"title":"How a Comparative Study of Childhood Became a Story of Global Crisis","authors":"B. Woodhouse","doi":"10.18574/nyu/9780814794845.003.0001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18574/nyu/9780814794845.003.0001","url":null,"abstract":"Chapter one provides a chronological account of the evolution of the project. It began in 2008 as a study comparing Italy’s social welfare approach and with the United States’ free market approach, to explore how social polices affect the ecology of childhood in rich nations. It rapidly became the story of an environmental crisis on a global scale. When the great recession struck both countries, the vulnerability of both systems was revealed. Even as politicians seeking to stabilize markets slashed at existing safety nets, neuroscientific research was documenting the lifelong effects of adverse childhood experiences (ACE) on brain development, adult health and well-being. The strains of recession fuelled a populist backlash and nationalistic political leaders in both countries gained control by inflaming anti-immigrant and white nationalist sentiments. The discontents of globalization, including market economics, technological revolution, rising inequality, mass migration, and climate change, were clearly calling into question dominant assumptions about prosperity through limitless growth. The book evolved to document these changes over a ten-year period. Chapter one closes by explaining the rationale for starting at the micro level; examining the small worlds of children provides a foundation for understanding how global forces are affecting the intimate ecologies of childhood.","PeriodicalId":397042,"journal":{"name":"The Ecology of Childhood","volume":"16 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-01-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121507029","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A Tale of Two Villages","authors":"B. Woodhouse","doi":"10.18574/nyu/9780814794845.003.0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18574/nyu/9780814794845.003.0003","url":null,"abstract":"Chapter three opens with detailed the two villages that are compared in this book, Scanno Italy and Cedar Key Florida. The portraits cover demography, history, political structure, geography, natural surroundings, social customs and traditions, with a particular focus on the lives of children. Both communities serve populations hovering around 1,700; both are majority Caucasian; both have strong community identities and traditions; and both are located in remote natural environments, with Scanno tucked in a valley of the Apennine Mountains in the Abruzzo region of Central Italy and Cedar Key occupying a chain of islands on the sparsely settled Gulf Coast of Florida in the South of the United States. The village portraits are followed by explicit comparisons of similarities and differences that are most relevant to the ecology of childhood, including early childhood and education systems, access to free play spaces, living on the edge of natural disaster, children’s sense of history and place, economic trauma and resilience, and presence or absence of racial and ethnic tension. The chapter closes with an exercise in triangulation, using multiple sources and uncomfortable conversations to explore attitudes towards racial and ethnic diversity.","PeriodicalId":397042,"journal":{"name":"The Ecology of Childhood","volume":"112 4","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-01-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114108221","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Role of Children’s Rights","authors":"B. Woodhouse","doi":"10.18574/nyu/9780814794845.003.0010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18574/nyu/9780814794845.003.0010","url":null,"abstract":"Chapter ten compares the threats to sustainability of social environments identified in the prior chapter with the existential threat of climate change. The author calls for a similar transformation of macrosystemic that shapes out social and political worlds. She proposes adopting ecogenerism, which treats the welfare of future generations as a its paramount vale, as the agent of transformation. To guide in defining children’s essential needs and rights, and to measure progress in creating a wordl fit for children, the author proposes the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) as the most broadly accepted normative framework. The author introduces the rights protected by the CRC, first in child-friendly language and then using the more complex language and interpretive tools of human rights law. The author highlights various innovative CRC principles that can change play a role in transforming the ecology of childhood. They include: viewing the best interest of the child holistically as protecting the full range of children’s rights; bridging the public/private divide by clarifying children’s positive rights to social welfare supports; and integrating the science of child development into the scheme of human rights.","PeriodicalId":397042,"journal":{"name":"The Ecology of Childhood","volume":"60 4","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-01-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"120920393","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Tools for Studying Childhood","authors":"B. Woodhouse","doi":"10.18574/nyu/9780814794845.003.0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18574/nyu/9780814794845.003.0002","url":null,"abstract":"Chapter two discusses the models, methods and value metrics used in this book. It presents the ecological model developed by sociologist Urie Bronfenbrenner, which places the child at the center of overlapping and intersecting microsystems (e.g., family, school, peer group) where children’s daily lives unfold. Encircling these microsystems are layers of exosystems (e.g., healthcare, justice systems and labor markets) where children may rarely go but that powerfully affect them. Surrounding and permeating the entire ecological diagram are macrosystemic forces, defined as the dominant ideas, values, prejudices, and powers of the surrounding society. The primary methods or frameworks for analysis deployed in the book are comparative legal method, sociology, ethnography and an environmentalist perspective, incorporating ideas like sustainability and the precautionary principle of avoiding harm. However, evaluating outcomes requires identifying a value system. Drawing on the work of Erik Erikson, the book proposes ecogenerism, a value system that treats the meeting of children’s essential needs and the welfare of succeeding generations as the paramount goals of society. The chapter closes with a description of how and why the two villages, Scanno, Italy and Cedar Key, Florida, were chosen to serve as petri dishes for comparative ethnographic study.","PeriodicalId":397042,"journal":{"name":"The Ecology of Childhood","volume":"198 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-01-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126447456","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Falling Birth Rates and Rural Depopulation","authors":"B. Woodhouse","doi":"10.18574/nyu/9780814794845.003.0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18574/nyu/9780814794845.003.0005","url":null,"abstract":"Chapter five moves from ethnography at the village level to examine the demographics of declining fertility and rural depopulation plaguing many affluent nations. A failure of generational renewal threatens the well-being of individuals, communities and societies. With the story of a child who is the last child in his remote Italian village, the author illustrates the critical importance of children to each other and to their communities. After introducing demographic concepts such as birth rate and replacement rate, total fertility rate and replacement rate fertility, the book discusses the low birth rate crisis in Italy where the population is declining at an unsustainable rate. It examines factors affecting birth rates, including adolescent fertility rate, mother’s marital status, percentage of women in the workforce, and gendered division of domestic labour. In comparison with Italy, US birth rates have been relatively robust; however, after the Great Recession US birth rates declined steadily and are now well below replacement rate. The chapter closes with discussion of the interplay between politics and demographics, including rules on birth right citizenship, the role of immigration in rejuvenating populations, and the misuse of demographic data to fuel anti-immigrant, sectarian, and racial conflict.","PeriodicalId":397042,"journal":{"name":"The Ecology of Childhood","volume":"15 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-01-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123922611","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Great Recession Crosses the Atlantic","authors":"B. Woodhouse","doi":"10.18574/nyu/9780814794845.003.0008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18574/nyu/9780814794845.003.0008","url":null,"abstract":"Chapter eight follows the economic crisis as it spreads to Europe. While the U.S. was only moderately affected, between 2008 and 2012 the worst hit European countries suffered spikes in child poverty greater than in any political or economic crisis since World War II. Children experienced declines in nutrition, life satisfaction, while levels of stress and the percentage of youth not in education employment or training (NEETs) rose dramatically. The chapter explains how the financial crisis flowed through the transmission channels of banking, labor markets and the public sector, flooding downstream to create household impact, in rising joblessness and unravelling safety nets, producing direct impact on children and youth. Unlike the U.S., Eurozone countries could not deploy monetary and fiscal policies that might have mitigated the impact on children. Instead, the EU imposed drastic austerity measures, forcing cuts in welfare and pensions and increases in taxes. A backlash followed in both the U.S. and Europe, fuelling nationalist movements like Trump’s America First, U.K.’s Brexit, and Italy’s anti-immigrant Northern League. The continuing legacy of recession is captured in current statistics on five “childhood enders”—infant mortality, malnutrition, school leaving, violence and children having children.","PeriodicalId":397042,"journal":{"name":"The Ecology of Childhood","volume":"26 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-01-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121214860","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Building Small Worlds in Urban Spaces","authors":"B. Woodhouse","doi":"10.18574/nyu/9780814794845.003.0012","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18574/nyu/9780814794845.003.0012","url":null,"abstract":"Chapter twelve calls for a renewal of the “small is beautiful” movement and explores how the benefits of growing up in a village can be recreated in urban settings. The author presents E. F. Schumacher’s 1973 book Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered, and its relationship to contemporary concepts, such as sustainability and the circular economy. that focus on sustaining human-scaled communities rather than on growing the GDP. The author describes and compares two initiatives that mobilize the strength of collaborative community to benefit at risk children and youth.\u0000The first is set in the city of Naples, in southern Italy, where a parish priest named Antonio Loffredo tapped the energy and aspirations of young people to build a collaborative community cooperative in an inner city neighbourhood called La Sanita’, as an alternative to the lure of organized crime. The second is the Harlem Children’s Zone (HCZ), founded in the historically black neighbourhood of New York City by Geoffrey Canada, to prove that black children, given a fair start, could achieve the American dream. While similar in many ways, each initiative was shaped by and reflects the macrosystemic values of the surrounding culture.","PeriodicalId":397042,"journal":{"name":"The Ecology of Childhood","volume":"32 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-01-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131975285","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Globalization","authors":"B. Woodhouse","doi":"10.7551/mitpress/11728.003.0013","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/11728.003.0013","url":null,"abstract":"Chapter nine identifies the elephant in the room—the threat to children’s well-being posed by globalization. While recognizing the many benefits of globalism, the author identifies six damaging phenomena related to globalization that are degrading the ecology of childhood. These threats are (1) unrestrained capitalism, (2) runaway technological revolution, (3) rising inequality, (4) mass migration, (5) racial and ethnic conflict, and (6) the apocalyptic crisis of climate change. The author shows how these phenomena, far from being distant and abstract from children’s lives, are affecting every level of the ecology of childhood, from the microsystems of family life to the macrosystems that shape national and global agendas. Collectively, these phenomena are responsible for many of the problems already highlighted in the book, including deteriorating wages and working conditions for parents, diminished opportunity for young people to start families, the trauma of family separation and forced migration, and unconscionable rates of child poverty even in rich countries. These troubling developments, if unrecognized and unaddressed, threaten children’s cognitive and social development, undercut intergenerational solidarity, and increase children’s vulnerability to illness, natural disaster and environmental degradation.","PeriodicalId":397042,"journal":{"name":"The Ecology of Childhood","volume":"11 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-01-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125440068","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"How the CRC Affects Actual Children’s Lives","authors":"B. Woodhouse","doi":"10.18574/nyu/9780814794845.003.0011","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18574/nyu/9780814794845.003.0011","url":null,"abstract":"Chapter eleven uses stories drawn from the author’s field work in Italy to rebut the charge that the CRC makes no difference in the lives of real world children. These narratives explore how specific CRC rights, including the right to play, the right to participation in civic life, the right to be heard in judicial and administrative proceedings, the rights of children accused of crimes, the right to education, the rights to identity and family, the right to adoption, and the right to inclusion of children with disabilities, have changed the lives of specific children. The author explores the connections between these children’s stories and Italy’s ratification and implementation of the CRC and how the CRC’s principles have played out in application. These examples show how a truly rights regarding macrosystem can change the ecology of childhood from the bottom up, by influencing family and community culture, as well as from the top down, by changing laws and policies.","PeriodicalId":397042,"journal":{"name":"The Ecology of Childhood","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-01-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130266850","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Magic of Mesosystems, Seedbeds of Solidarity","authors":"B. Woodhouse","doi":"10.18574/nyu/9780814794845.003.0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18574/nyu/9780814794845.003.0004","url":null,"abstract":"Chapter four explores how the activities and relationships occurring in the spaces where microsystems overlap function as seedbeds of solidarity, generating a shared sense of identity, fostering social cohesion and transforming “other people’s children” into “our children.” The author focuses on interactions among the primary social institutions comprising children’s microsystems: family, faith community, school, peer group, and neighbourhood. Drawing on observations from the villages under study, the author illustrates the dynamic created when these social institutions cooperate, collaborate and even engage in friendly competition in support of the community’s children. The chapter highlights the role of rituals and traditions in building community identity and solidarity in both villages. It explores how village identity can endure across time and distance in migrants’ attachments to their home towns. In closing, it predicts further erosion of community identity due to global economic policies and divisive political movements.","PeriodicalId":397042,"journal":{"name":"The Ecology of Childhood","volume":"18 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-01-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130295134","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}