Showing titles in Children's Studies

In this poignant memoir, Charles Spencer recounts the trauma of being sent away from home at age eight to attend a boarding school. A Very Private School offers a clear-eyed firsthand account of a culture of cruelty at the school Spencer attended in his youth and provides important insights into an antiquated boarding system. Drawing on the memories of many of his schoolboy contemporaries, as well as his own letters and diaries from the time, he reflects on the hopelessness and abandonment he felt aged eight, describing the pain of homesickness and the appalling inescapability of it all.

A word-of-mouth best seller which has become one of the best loved and most successful books in the parenting field. With around 20 percent new material, Steve Biddulph’s Raising Boys is to be rereleased this month with some startling new research on what helps - and what harms - boys.

One hundred and ten years ago, Maria Montessori, the first female physician in Italy, devised a very different method of educating children, based on her observations of how they naturally learn. In Montessori, Angeline Stoll Lillard shows that science has finally caught up with Maria Montessori. Lillard presents the research behind nine insights that are foundations of Montessori education, describing how each of these insights is applied in the Montessori classroom.  

An estimated 800,000 children are reported missing each year in the United States. Only one in 10,000 are found dead. Yet unsolved child murders are almost a daily occurrence - of nearly 52,000 juvenile homicides between 1980 and 2008, more than 20 percent remain open. Drawing on FBI reports, police and court records, and interviews with victims’ families, this book provides details and evidence for 18 unsolved cases from 1956 to 1998. 

In her new book, Cathy Glass, the number one best-selling author of Damaged, tells the story of the Alice, a young and vulnerable girl who is desperate to return home to her mother. Alice, aged four, is snatched by her mother the day she is due to arrive at Cathy's house. Drug-dependent and mentally ill, but desperate to keep hold of her daughter, Alice's mother snatches her from her parents' house and disappears.

In Girls on the Edge, psychologist and physician Leonard Sax argues that many girls today have a brittle sense of self-they may look confident and strong on the outside, but they're fragile within. Sax offers the tools we need to help them become independent and confident women, and provides parents with practical tips on everything from helping their daughter limit her time on social media, to choosing a sport, to nurturing her spirit through female-centered activities.

A difficult home life. A missed diagnosis. A disrupted education. Falling in with the wrong crowd. Every year thousands of children fall through the cracks in our society and become victims of a destructive cycle that ends in exploitation, violence, and lost life chances. As Commissioner for Children in England, Anne Longfield CBE witnessed the devastating effects of this cycle as vulnerable young people were failed by systems too underfunded and overstretched to protect them. Young Lives, Big Ambitions is a plan to fix our broken system and give every young person the chance to succeed.

The story we usually tell about childhood and success is the one about intelligence: success comes to those who score highest on tests, from preschool admissions to SATs. But in How Children Succeed, Paul Tough argues that the qualities that matter most have more to do with character: skills like perseverance, curiosity, conscientiousness, optimism, and self-control. How Children Succeed introduces us to a new generation of researchers and educators who, for the first time, are using the tools of science to peel back the mysteries of character.

Criminologist Christopher Berry-Dee goes behind bars to get the last word from some of the worst criminals in the world. They speak of their violence and shocking deeds in their own words, from within some of the hardest prisons on earth. These interviews have been collated into this disturbing and unflinching analysis of the criminal mind. Here is what happens when you meet the people most of us know only from our nightmares and newspaper headlines. 

Never Let Go is a supportive and practical guide for parents looking after a child with a mental illness. Suzanne Alderson understands the agonising struggle of bringing a child back from the brink of suicide, having spent three years supporting her own daughter through recovery. Her method of 'partnering, not parenting' has now helped thousands of other parents through her charity, Parenting Mental Health.

What is the boy crisis? It's a crisis of education. For the first time in American history, our sons will have less education than their dads. It's a crisis of mental health. As boys become young men, their suicide rates go from equal to girls to six times that of young women. It's a crisis of sexuality. Sex is a minefield for our sons. They're bombarded with mixed messages, afraid of being either too sensitive or not sensitive enough.

Cruel to Be Kind is the true story of Max, age six. He is fostered by Cathy while his mother is in hospital with complications from type 2 diabetes. Fostering Max gets off to a bad start when his mother, Caz, complains and threatens Cathy even before Max has moved in. Cathy and her family are shocked when they first meet Max. But his social worker isn't the only one in denial; his whole family are, too.

Louise has trouble on her hands from the first moment that 5-year-old Billy Blackthorn comes to stay. He is one of more than 20 children taken into care from a single family, and erupts into the Allen household with a volatility that is frightening and disturbing in equal measure. It is only as Louise begins to uncover the secrets of Billy's dark past that she begins to understand what made his family 'untouchable'.

When Sky and her older sister Avril were taken into care, the social workers knew this was a case like no other. Raised by unhinged parents who hoarded compulsively, creating horrific conditions no child should live in, the two girls arrived at foster carer Louise's home, neglected, malnourished and indoctrinated. Louise had to draw on all of her experience as one of Britain's leading foster carers to rehabilitate and change the course of their lives.

An introverted, unusual young boy, isolated by his obsessions and a loner at school, Chris Packham was only at home in the fields and woods around his suburban home. But when he stole a young kestrel from its nest, he was about to embark on a friendship that would teach him what it meant to love - and that would change him forever.

A word-of-mouth best seller which has become one of the best loved and most successful books in the parenting field. Steve Biddulph's Raising Boys is to be released on audio with some startling new research on what helps - and what harms - boys. In this expanded and updated audio edition, Steve Biddulph shares and gives practical and honest advice to parents so they can recognise the different stages of boyhood and learn how to raise happy, confident and kind young men.

Parents Angelina and Ben exist in enviable luxury: not just wealth, success and a gorgeous home, but a loving relationship and beautiful twin babies to complete the perfect family. But having it all means that you have the most to lose. And when cracks begin to appear things fall apart at a shocking pace; and it's twins Max and Mia who suffer the most. Money isn't enough to paper over the problems in this extraordinary and heartbreaking story. It is a foster-caring experience like no other, and one which tests Louise's emotional strength to the core.

When identical twins June and Jennifer Gibbons were three, they began to reject communication with anyone but each other, and so began a childhood bound together in a strange and secret world. As they grew up, love, hate and genius united to push them to the extreme margins of society and, following a five week spree of vandalism and arson, the silent twins were sentenced to a gruelling twelve-year detention in Broadmoor. Award-winning investigative journalist Marjorie Wallace delves into the twins' silent world.

Why America's sons are underachieving, and what we can do about it. Something is happening to boys today. From kindergarten to college, American boys are, on average, less resilient and less ambitious than they were a mere 20 years ago. The gender gap in college attendance and graduation rates has widened dramatically. In Boys Adrift, Dr. Leonard Sax delves into the scientific literature and draws on more than 20 years of clinical experience to explain why boys and young men are failing in school and disengaged at home.

Baby X is a shocking and unforgettable story of how some of the UK's most disadvantaged children escaped their tormentors - and explains why some cases, similar to that of Baby P's, ended in tragedy. When super-tough cop Sergeant Harry Keeble announced he was joining Hackney's ailing Child Protection Team in 2000, his colleagues were astounded. Known as the 'Cardigan Squad', its officers were seen as glorified social workers dealing with domestics. The reality was very different.