Robin Lynn Leavitt presents in a provocative ethnography the lived experiences of infants and toddlers in day care centers. This text speaks to researchers and instructors interested in infancy, early childhood socialization, child care, and interpretive research. Leavitt's original application of multiple theoretical perspectives--interpretive, interactionist, critical, feminist, and postmodern-- yields powerful insights into the problematic emotional experiences and relations between infants and their caregivers.

The day care center is described as an institution that imposes a temporal...

In this thoughtful book, Stephen Smith shows how parents and educators can become aware of the positive value of risk in children's lives and how they can be challenged to take risks that are worth their while. This text is a "how so" much more than a "how to" book. It shows by evocative example and provocative questions how adults can help children mature with confidence and a strong sense of physical competence.

The analysis shows the place, silence, atmosphere, challenge, encounter, practice and possibility of risk-taking. It consistently and conscientiously draws attention to a...

Play has been part of early childhood programs since the initial kindergarten developed by Friedreich Froebel more than one hundred and fifty years ago. While research shows that most teachers value children's play, they often do not know how to guide that play to make it more educational. Too often, in reflecting the value of child-initiated activities, teachers set the stage for children's play, observe it, but hesitate to intervene in that play. They may fear that to intervene is to create a developmentally inappropriate set of educational practices. However, the lack of intervention may...