Limit search to available items
Book Cover
Book
Author Leach, Penelope.

Title Children first : what our society must do--and is not doing--for our children today / Penelope Leach
Edition First edition
Published New York : Alfred Knopf : Distributed by Random House, 1994

Copies

Location Call no. Vol. Availability
 W'PONDS  305.23 Lea/Cfw  AVAILABLE
Description xvi, 303 pages ; 25 cm
Contents Pt. 1. Parents and Society. 1. People, Profits and Parenting -- Pt. 2. Children and Parents. 2. Mother, Father or Parent? 3. Getting Started. 4. Daycare: Dreams and Nightmares. 5. Growing Up Takes Time. 6. Discipline, Self-Discipline and Learning How to Behave. 7. The Preschool Years: Learning and Lessons, Education and School. 8. 7-Up: The Years We Ignore -- Pt. 3. Putting Children First. 9. New Approaches to Poverty and Privilege. 10. New Approaches to Human Rights for Children. 11. New Approaches to Working and Caring. 12. New Approaches to Practical Parenting
Summary Children First is the most important and urgent book on childcare we have yet had from the internationally admired author of the classic Your Baby & Child. In it Penelope Leach calls on us as individuals and as a nation to make good on the promise of our endless rhetoric about the importance of family by creating the indispensable economic and social supports for children that are now so tragically missing. She asks us - in our legislation, in our policy-making, in our industrial might - to think of children first and thereby let a new rush of sanity and health into our society. She presents us with the paradox that after spending spectacular millions and employing the most sophisticated medical science to help children come into the world, our society turns its back on them in the very years during which they are developing. She shows us how, while paying constant lip service to family, we fail to acknowledge the difficulties of parenting in the nineties and to make sure that conditions essential to the raising of children are available to parents. It is Penelope Leach's contention that what parents do for their children - what they are able to do - depends on what society actually wants, approves and encourages. And, in a powerful argument against complacency, she presents specific steps by which we, as members of society, can move to fashion a new economic priority for all children; to make the child central in the fight against poverty and inequity; to achieve a rational standard of human rights for our children; and to find, in our own lives, effective new approaches to positive parenting. Provocative, passionate, courageous, Children First is a groundbreaking book. It has the extraordinary potential to affect the lives not only of our own children but also of the children that they themselves will have in years to come
Notes Includes index
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references (pages 267-291) and index
Subject Child rearing.
Child care.
Parenting.
LC no. 93035476
ISBN 0679421335 :