A 7-year-old girl visited the outpatient clinic because of difficulty walking. She had never managed to run properly, and experienced frequent falls ever since she began walking independently at the age of 18 months. Jumping was not possible, and when stepping up or down, she needed support below her arms. There was no fluctuation of symptoms during the day, but she had suffered from periods that could last several weeks in which using the stairs was completely impossible. She was unable to blow up a balloon and her speech was slow and poorly articulated. There were no complaints about chewing or swallowing. She had a healthy non-identical twin sister and the family history was unremarkable.

This chapter discusses Clare’s nature poetry, in the contexts of the politics of land use, then and now. It reads the verse against issues including the introduction of capitalist forms of agriculture and their effects, including the dispossession and pauperization of agricultural labourers and the degradation of ecosystems. It also considers the politics of language and memory in Clare’s poetry, in relation to changes in the agricultural economy.

Violence and time are elements shaping the lives of children. For children, time is something that to a large part is placed in the future, while to adults, it is placed in the past; still, it is within this time that violence directed toward children occurs because they are children, often with the purpose of shaping their personhood and controlling them. To be able to speak freely about how time and violence socially construct the self-identity as a child is an important act of resistance against the use of violence constructing childhood but also an important form of protection. To fight violence, the child rights discourse must move beyond the child’s rights to be heard to also take seriously the right to freedom of speech.

Far from being cut-down versions of the adult form, children’s dictionaries constitute a distinct genre with their own history and methodology. The chapter charts the development of children’s dictionaries, from Renaissance bilingual dictionaries to the present day, showing how they have evolved to reflect changing perceptions of childhood. It discusses the bewildering range of dictionaries now available for children as they progress from ABCs and picture dictionaries to those for school use and creative writing, including innovative subgenres based on fictional worlds and dictionaries supporting language revitalisation. Drawing on historical and contemporary examples, the chapter explores content and page design adapted to engage young readers. It considers how lexicographers aim to reflect the world as experienced by children, from the selection of headwords to the framing of definitions, using dedicated corpora and reading programmes. The tension between descriptive and prescriptive approaches is often acute in children’s dictionaries, for example over the inclusion of slang and taboo words, and lexicographers aim to balance young dictionary users’ needs against adult perceptions of what a children’s dictionary is for.

Childhood is a critical period in terms of growth and development regarding cognition, language, social, emotional, and physical competence. This takes place within the context of different and varying social environments, which can impact on children’s learning and understandings of the worlds in which they live and how they fit into them. Childhood is a critical period in terms of addressing issues of discrimination and inequality that exist in society — discrimination that children and their families from minority cultures, and from other points of difference, can encounter, including in educational contexts. However, it is also a critical time in which to address the discrimination that children perpetuate in their daily interactions with others. Research shows that children are aware of and participate in, for example, racial, gendered, classed and (dis)ablist based discriminatory practices early, perpetuating the power relations that exist in the broader society around difference. However, much of this practice can go unnoticed or rationalised by adults through discourses of childhood, child development, and childhood innocence.

This chapter reflects on the class system and economic background of Debussy’s youth and the implications they had for his education. Given that he received little formal education until he entered the Paris Conservatoire, there is ample opportunity here to assess how typical this background was, or if it was shaped by the parents’ unusual circumstances. Arising out of this, there is a discussion of contemporary conceptions of the family, both at the time of Debussy’s childhood and in the twentieth century, when he became head of a small family and had to cope with the consequences (he apparently coped badly much of the time and resented the demands of family life). Despite his ardent desire to make up for everything he did not have as a child, Debussy struggled to reconcile the demands of his family with his professional aspirations at a time when men were increasingly expected to participate in and enjoy family life. Whether his struggles emanated from his artistic aspirations or his self-centred character, Debussy’s personal and professional choices were undoubtedly shaped by the circumstances of his upbringing and the increasing importance accorded to the family in French society during his lifetime.

This chapter provides details of the different kinds of vaccines available (live, attenuated, killed, inactivated, recombinant, subunit, mRNA, DNA and vector) for virus infections (e.g. SARS-CoV-2, HAV, HBV, influenzaviruses, JEE, measlesvirus, mumpsvirus, rubellavirus, HPV, rabies, polio, rotavirus, smallpox, mpox, yellow fever virus) in humans. It details the routes of administration and usage (e.g. pre-exposure or post-exposure, childhood, occupational health, travel and for at-risk groups).

The aim of this chapter is to establish that children are owed a sense of their own interiority. The chapter argues that although the literature on philosophy of childhood constitutes an advance on the deficit model of childhood insofar as it supports children’s rights and childhood goods, it risks reifying adult-child relations by continuing to essentialize childhood. While Gareth B. Matthews’ theory of development as socially and linguistically mediated begins to shift the focus toward the child’s own inner life, it falls short insofar as it fails to challenge the fact/value dichotomy. Drawing upon Iris Murdoch’s philosophy, the chapter concludes that a rejection of this dichotomy is in fact necessary for developing the notion of a morally inflected consciousness that is as available to children as it is adults.

Parental care in humans is remarkably extensive, with many individuals living only a fraction of their lives outside of the sphere of parental influence, and parental care is exceptionally plastic, with the extent and form of care varying across contexts and individuals. Behavioral ecological studies of parenting fall into three main foci. First, parental care is studied in terms of life history tradeoffs, including between mating and parenting effort, and between fertility and investment per offspring. Second, parental care is studied as a conflict trait, including sibling conflict, parent-offspring conflict, and sexual conflict between mothers and fathers. Finally, parental investment theory addresses how individual characteristics, such as birth order, sex and putative relatedness, influence parental strategies. For each focus, predictions are context-specific with socioecology dictating the local costs and payoffs to parental care. Over 50 years of behavioral ecological studies of parenting have transformed understandings of the human family, exposing the fragile mix of cooperation and competition underlying family relationships. Questions remain, however, particularly with regard to parental strategies in nonnuclear family structures, the role of physiological, psychological and cultural mechanisms in regulating adaptive strategies, and the coevolution of parental care with culturally variable beliefs about kinship, gender and reproduction.

Child-focused education programs have been developed in efforts to prevent child sexual abuse and to provide children who may already be experiencing abuse with strategies for seeking help. The design and delivery of these programs must be based on empirical evidence rather than ideology. Program evaluations have demonstrated that prevention education can provide children with knowledge and skills for responding to, and reporting, potential sexual abuse. Preschool and school-based programs are typically delivered to children in class groups via a series of lessons that convey core concepts and messages, and are best taught using engaging pedagogical strategies such as multimedia technologies, animations, theatre or puppet shows, songs, picture books and games. This chapter outlines the key characteristics of effective child sexual abuse prevention education and identifies directions for future research and practice.