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Behind from the Start: How America´s War on the Poor is Harming Our Most Vulnerable Children
Lenette Lessing
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Description for Behind from the Start: How America´s War on the Poor is Harming Our Most Vulnerable Children
Hardback. Num Pages: 248 pages. BIC Classification: JFFA; JKSB; JKSB1; JKSN. Category: (G) General (US: Trade). Dimension: 166 x 243 x 2. Weight in Grams: 520.
Behind from the Start examines the link between America's shaming, blaming, and marginalizing of poor parents, and American policies that jeopardize the life chances of vulnerable young children, thereby maintaining the cycle of chronic poverty. Lenette Azzi-Lessing reveals how negative public and political discourse regarding poor families impacts the very policies and programs intended to support them, which have in turn failed to meet their aims. She considers the cultural and political forces that contribute to intergenerational poverty in the U.S., and the consequences for the millions of young children in families stuck at the bottom of our economy. ... Read more Close to six million children ages five and under live in poverty and that number continues to grow. Research has shown that the experience of poverty in the first years of life is particularly harmful, blunting physical and brain development, increasing risk for chronic health issues and injury, and limiting lifelong capacity for learning and success. Behind from the Start reveals that what began as the War on Poverty has, over the course of the past five decades, been contorted into a War on the Poor in which the lives of America's poorest children remain heartbreakingly grim, as are their prospects for a healthy and successful future. Drawing from fields as wide-ranging as media studies, psychology, social welfare, public policy, neuroscience, and education as well as her own considerable personal experience, Lessing makes a forceful case for action to break out of this self-fulfilling cycle. Show Less
Product Details
Publisher
Oxford University Press Inc
Place of Publication
New York, United States
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Usually ships in 15 to 20 working days
About Lenette Lessing
Lenette Azzi-Lessing, PhD, is Associate Professor in the Division of Social Work, Leadership, and Public Policy at Wheelock College, Boston. She is the founder and director of Wheelock's Graduate Certificate Program in Early Childhood Mental Health and faculty leader of the college's South Africa Partnership for Early Childhood Development. She joined the faculty after more than 25 years as a ... Read morefront-line social worker, CEO, and policy advocate. Dr. Azzi-Lessing founded one of the nation's first programs for drug- and alcohol-affected families in the child welfare system, and was twice awarded the Commissioner's Award for Outstanding Contribution to the Prevention of Child Abuse and Neglect, by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Show Less
Reviews for Behind from the Start: How America´s War on the Poor is Harming Our Most Vulnerable Children
From the Foreword by Lisbeth Schorr, Senior Fellow at the Center for the Study of Social Policy: Lenette Azzi- Lessing's book stands alone among important social policy books in synthesizing the critical knowledge from all of the domains that must be connected if ambitious social change is to succeed. She draws on the most current findings from ... Read moreresearch and from experience. She documents the unmet needs of vulnerable young children, adolescents, and their families, and puts it all together to identify the unparalleled opportunities now at hand to address those needs. Despite decades of anti-poverty programs, the proportion of children in poverty remains unchanged. Behind From the Start explores the issue of child poverty in detail. Azzi-Lessing exposes the interconnected circumstances that keep children in poverty. She aids readers in understanding why the poverty rate in the United States remains highest among simlarly developed but less wealty countries, the detrimental effects of poverty on children under six, and of how our responses to families in poverty are often harmful perpetuation the cycle of poverty....This book is highly recommended to anyone interested in a reader friendly yet comprehensive book about child poverty.
Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare Behind From the Start is a searing expos that traces the responsibility of politicians, the media, academics, and policymakers for the unnecessary tragedy of American childhood poverty. We can do better, its author argues, with adequately funded 'extra-strength' programs and locally driven systemic interventions powered by systematic learning methods, science-enlightened policy targeting the structural roots of poverty, and a national movement to make 'ending child poverty the defining cause of our time.
Joshua Sparrow, MD, Harvard Medical School Professor Azzi-Lessing has written a very accessible account of the plight of young children in the United States born into poverty. . . . She provides a thorough overview of an array of programs aimed at improving child outcomes for vulnerable young children, including Early Head Start, maternal child home visiting, universal pre-Kindergarten, and quality early care and education, as well as some newer promising programs. . . . The policy strategies and reforms that she proposes are comprehensive but within our reach. This text is a must-read for advocates hoping to build a brighter future for American children.
Pamela C. High, MD, Professor of Pediatrics, W. Alpert School of Medicine, Brown University First, Azzi-Lessing combines engaging personal storytelling, keen historical analysis, and careful scientific reasoning to refute the 'blame and shame the poor' rhetoric that pervades our public discourse and public policies. Then, she brings innovative thinking and an animating moral fervor to propose 'extra-strength' programs and policies that really could work to combat poverty and to lift the burden our society currently places on the backs of children and families living in poverty. A tour de force!
J. Lawrence Aber, PhD, Willner Family Professor in Psychology and Public Policy, New York University In this timely and masterful synthesis of current research and personal experience as a social worker, Azzi-Lessing (Wheelock College) brings together knowledge from across a variety of disciplines to explain the disastrous effects of poverty on the poorest children in the US. The author spends much of the book dismantling racist and classist misperceptions that influence public policy against the poor...this book is well researched, readable, and exceptionally well timed, explaining how and why extreme poverty destroys the lives of poor children in the US while offering hope for a solution.
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