Raising America

Social Science
Raising America PDF Author: Ann Hulbert
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307773396
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 464

Book Description
Since the beginning of the twentieth century, millions of anxious parents have turned to child-rearing manuals for reassurance. Instead, however, they have often found yet more cause for worry. In this rich social history, Ann Hulbert analyzes one hundred years of shifting trends in advice and discovers an ongoing battle between two main approaches: a “child-centered” focus on warmly encouraging development versus a sterner “parent-centered” emphasis on instilling discipline. She examines how pediatrics, psychology, and neuroscience have fueled the debates but failed to offer definitive answers. And she delves into the highly relevant and often turbulent personal lives of the popular advice-givers, from L. Emmett Holt and Arnold Gesell to Bruno Bettelheim and Benjamin Spock to the prominent (and ever conflicting) experts of today.

The Role of Structural Reforms in Raising Economic Growth in Central America

Business & Economics
The Role of Structural Reforms in Raising Economic Growth in Central America PDF Author: Mr.Andrew Swiston
Publisher: International Monetary Fund
ISBN: 1463923279
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 20

Book Description
Central America experienced moderate growth during the last decade, including in the years leading up to the global financial crisis, but the rate of convergence toward advanced country income levels has still been slow. Moreover, forecasts imply that these trends will continue. What can be done to spur higher growth in Central America? We bring new data to bear on this question-version 7.0 of the Penn World Table and a new IMF database on structural reforms. Our cross-country panel regression of economic growth using System GMM captures the importance to growth of conditional convergence, factor accumulation, and macro policies. In addition, structural efficiency is a significant factor in explaining growth performance. We construct a broad index of efficiency and find that increasing the degree of structural efficiency by one standard deviation raises growth by 1⁄2 percent. This implies that Central American countries could significantly increase their long-run growth rates by increasing the flexibility of markets and improving the quality of regulation.

Raising Student Learning in Latin America

Education
Raising Student Learning in Latin America PDF Author: Emiliana Vegas
Publisher: World Bank Publications
ISBN: 9780821370834
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 262

Book Description
Understanding what and how students learn has emerged as a salient issue in Latin America, a region where the majority of children now have access to schools but few students learn the skills they need to succeed. 'Raising Student Learning in Latin America' examines recent advances in our understanding of the policies and programs that affect student learning and provides policy makers with effective options. This volume relies on indicators from national and international assessments of subject matter knowledge plus intermediate learning indicators, such as dropout and completion rates. The first part focuses on the central role of student learning in education. The second part reviews the evidence on factors and policies that affect student learning. The final part addresses policy optons on education quality assurance.

The Problem with Parenting: How Raising Children Is Changing across America

Family & Relationships
The Problem with Parenting: How Raising Children Is Changing across America PDF Author: Nancy A. McDermott
Publisher: ABC-CLIO
ISBN: 1440853193
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 212

Book Description
The Problem with Parenting serves as an essential guide to the recent origins and current excesses of American parenting for students, parents, and policy makers interested in the changing role of the family in childrearing. Family scholarship focuses predominately on the evolution of family structure and function, with only passing references to parenting. Researchers who study parenting, however, invariably regard it as a sociological phenomenon with complex motivations rooted in factors such as class, economic instability, and new technologies. This book examines the relationship between changes to the family and the emergence of parenting, defined here as a specific mode of childrearing. It shows how, beginning in the 1970s, the family was transformed from a social unit that functioned as the primary institution for raising children into a vehicle for the nurturing and fulfillment of the self. The book pays special attention to socialization and describes how the change in our understanding of parenthood, from a state of being into the distinct activity of "parenting," is indicative of a disruption of our ability to transfer key cultural values and norms from one generation to the next. • Suggests that families are no longer able to reliably socialize children • Proposes that the reason the family has ceased to function as a socializing institution has less to do with changes in structure than the replacement of a child-centered ideal with a therapeutic imperative • Suggests that parenting is new mode of childrearing that arose in the absence of a reliable institution for childrearing • Argues that parenting culture itself is a response to the experience of the breakdown in socialization that occurred that began in the 1970s • Makes the case for a renewal of a societal commitment to children and the rising generation

Raising an African Child in America: from the Perspective of an Immigrant Nigerian Mom

Self-Help
Raising an African Child in America: from the Perspective of an Immigrant Nigerian Mom PDF Author: Marcellina Ndidi Oparaoji
Publisher: Xlibris Corporation
ISBN: 1503585115
Category : Self-Help
Languages : en
Pages : 94

Book Description
Like other African-born immigrants, I came to the shores of America from Nigeria, West Africa, some twenty-plus years ago as a young adult, freshly married to my Nigerian immigrant spouse. All we knew was what we learnt from our parents and community, growing up. Except for what we read in books about the outside world, we had no idea what lay ahead surviving in another environment outside our Third World. Our parents had sent us forth to study some more in an environment different from what we were used to, in so many ways. We had to make success of this opportunity that was costing them so much. Immigrant Nigerians coming to America are then faced with questions of how to raise their children. Should their offsprings be raised as Nigerians, Americans or to help them benefit from both worlds, as Nigerian-Americans? Who decides, the parents, the children or the society? What will be the fate of the next generation to come?

Handing Down the Faith

Religion
Handing Down the Faith PDF Author: Christian Smith
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190093331
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 256

Book Description
A new examination of how and why American religious parents seek to pass on religion to their children The most important influence shaping the religious and spiritual lives of children, youth, and teenagers is their parents. A myriad of studies show that the parents of American youth play the leading role in shaping the character of their religious and spiritual lives, even well after they leave home and often for the rest of their lives. We know a lot about the importance of parents in faith transmission. However we know much less about the actual beliefs, feelings, and activities of the parents themselves, what Christian Smith and Amy Adamczyk call the "intergenerational transmission of religious faith and practice." To address that gap, this book reports the findings of a new national study of religious parents in the United States. The findings and conclusions in Handing Down the Faith are based on 215 in-depth, personal interviews with religious parents from many traditions and different parts of the country, and sophisticated analyses of two nationally representative surveys of American parents about their religious parenting. Handing Down the Faith explores the background beliefs informing how and why religious parents seek to pass on religion to their children; examines how parenting styles interact with parent religiousness to shape effective religious transmission; shows how parents have been influenced by their experiences as children influenced by their own parents; reveals how religious parents view their congregations and what they most seek out in a local church, synagogue, temple, or mosque; explores the experiences and outlooks of immigrant parents including Latino Catholics, East Asian Buddhists, South Asian Muslims, and Indian Hindus. Smith and Adamczyk step back to consider how American religion has transformed over the last 100 years and to explain why parents today shoulder such a huge responsibility in transmitting religious faith and practice to their children. The book is rich in empirical evidence and unique in many of the topics it explores and explains, providing a variety of sometimes counterintuitive findings that will interest scholars of religion, social scientists interested in the family, parenting, and socialization; clergy and religious educators and leaders; and religious parents themselves.

Legacy

Political Science
Legacy PDF Author: Irene Petteice
Publisher: Publication Consultants
ISBN: 1594335613
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 358

Book Description
A man with aspirations of being a world leader, Barack Obama, a man with many secrets of his own, set out to destroy the strongest power by bankrupting the nation, diminishing its military, and apologizing to all other countries for its arrogance. A man that has his own army and concentration camps ready at his whim for you. A man that could and should have brought unity between black and white America but his cause was to further his own agenda to take guns away from America and destroy its Second Amendment. Barack Obama, the man that said he was a Christian when everything he did pointed to the fact that he is a Muslim. Barack Hussein Obama, the man who will go down in the annals of history known as a Muslim, a Luminati, a member of the New Black Panthers, a member of the gay community, and as the worst President the United States of America has ever elected.

Letters to America

Biography & Autobiography
Letters to America PDF Author: Michael Weingrad
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
ISBN: 0815653255
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages :

Book Description
Reuven Ben-Yosef (1937–2001) was born Robert Eliot Reiss to an assimilated Jewish family in New York. He switched from writing English poetry to Hebrew poetry after his immigration to Israel in 1959. He is the author of more than a dozen volumes of superb Hebrew poetry, as well as two collections of essays and two novels, and he won literary honors such as the Levi Eshkol Prize, the Bar-Ilan University Prize, and the Neuman and Kovner prizes for Hebrew literature. At the center of his oeuvre is the sequence of poems he wrote in the 1970s called "Mikhtavim la’Amerikah" (Letters to America), a searing and confessional set of addresses in the form of "letters" to his family members (none of whom, however, could read Hebrew) and to American Jewry as a whole. In this edited volume, Weingrad includes not only these expertly translated poems but also an extensive, fascinating introduction that helps us see Ben-Yosef’s personal poetry as part of a larger family story. While Ben-Yosef was writing about his American family members, they were writing about him. Ben- Yosef’s younger brother, poet James Reiss, began publishing highly praised collections of poems in the 1970s and addressed conflicts with his brother in a number of poems. Ben-Yosef’s brother-in-law, novelist William Luvaas, published a first novel that was clearly based upon the Reiss family. Ben-Yosef’s letters to America are therefore joined by his family members’ "letters" to Israel, through which the Reiss family collectively created its own literature of the American–Israeli relationship in miniature, the conflicts and rifts, rivalries and loyalties of family members and competing homelands. This essential introduction, which also describes Ben-Yosef’s early life as an American and the challenges of becoming an Israeli poet writing in Hebrew, enriches our understanding of the deeply personal poems collected in the rest of the volume. Weingrad compellingly argues that Ben-Yosef’s poems, though seemingly local in their explicit Israeli audience and address, implicitly speak to Jews in America about assimilation, heritage, and the struggle between competing identities.