Debating Early Child Care: The Relationship between Developmental Science and the Media

by Robert Crosnoe, Tama Leventhal

Overview

Throughout distressing cultural battles and disputes over child care, each side claims to have the best interests of children at heart. While developmental scientists have concrete evidence for this debate, their message is often lost or muddied by the media. To demonstrate why this problem matters, this book examines the extensive media coverage of the NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development – a long-running government-funded study that provides the most comprehensive look at the effects of early child care on American children. Analyses of newspaper articles and interviews with scientists and journalists reveal what happens to science in the public sphere and how children's issues can be used to question parents' choices. By shining light on these issues, the authors bring clarity to the enduring child care wars while providing recommendations for how scientists and the media can talk to – rather than past – each other.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781107472051
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	12/21/2017
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	184
Product dimensions:	5.94(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.39(d)

About the Author

Robert Crosnoe is the C. B. Smith, Sr Centennial Chair at the University of Texas, Austin. His research focuses on the education and healthy development of children from diverse backgrounds, and his books include Fitting In, Standing Out: Navigating the Social Challenges of High School to Get an Education (Cambridge, 2011) and Healthy Learners: A Whole Child Approach to Reducing Disparities in Early Education (2015). Dr Crosnoe has won research awards from the Society for Research in Child Development and the American Sociological Association.

Tama Leventhal is an Associate Professor in the Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Study and Human Development at Tufts University, Massachusetts. Her research is at the intersection of child development and social policy, with a focus on neighborhood and housing contexts. Her work appears in journals on developmental psychology, family studies, sociology, psychiatry and public health. She is co-editor of the Handbook of Child Psychology and Developmental Science: Ecological Settings and Processes in Developmental Systems, Volume 4 (2015).

Table of Contents

1. The child care wars; 2. Translating science for public consumption; 3. Media coverage of early child care research; 4. Mothers, children, and messages; 5. Gaining perspective on early child care research in the media; 6. Lessons learned for scientists, journalists, and parents; 7. Moving forward with developmental science in the media.