Childhood In True Notebooks, By Kevin Jackson

In the book A Child Called It David Pelzer relives the child abuse he once experienced as a kid. David was born on December 29, 1960 in Daly City,CA. He got abused by his alcoholic mother. David felt his father was his protector so when his parents got divorced that was a big problem. Soon after they started fighting he felt like everything was his fault.

In “Shapes of Childhood Recalled” by Maxine Greene the author explores how children and humans alike absorb and construe the world around them, from shapes and outlines to forming an understanding and fitting this information in their schema. Greene takes the reader on a journey in this passage from children not having any prior knowledge about their surrounding environment to being able to retrieve learned material. Many philosophers have used the term “tabula rasa” to describe how not only children learn from experiences and are initially born as a “blank slate” but also as adults continue to learn from what they encounter in life. This term was first introduced by John Locke in the 17th century but can be traced back to the writings of Aristotle

Childhood is a social construct that has been weaved together by societal norms and domineering perspectives. Childhood is not a physical or mental state but an abstraction that has been melded by society as time has progressed. In Karen Sanchez-Eppler’s excerpt titled “Childhood” from the novel Keywords for Children’s Literature, she explains how the attitudes and atmosphere surrounding childhood have vastly changed throughout history to yield the general, modern conception of childhood. Children have been deemed adults in the Middle Ages and childhood has been a vaguely regarded concept. However, as society has become more progressive and developed, an interest in distinguishing the young from the older individuals

A Child Called “It” is a powerful book written by Dave Pelzer about his childhood and the hardships he encountered with his family, peers, and community. Middle childhood can be a life altering point in a young child’s life, which many theorist have studied over the years. This paper will review a few of those theorist thoughts, and how their theories apply to young David’s childhood. The theorist work that will be covered will be Bronfenbrenner and his ecological systems model, Piaget’s theory of development, and lastly Kohlberg’s theory of moral reasoning. It is important to understand what was going through David’s mind as he dealt with this trauma and how he was able to survive it.

The book I read is called A Child Called It. It is written by Dave Pelzer. The theme of this book is to keep hope alive. You should have faith and dreams to have something to look forward to in your future especially when you feel you can’t go on any more. Like Dave, he felt trapped as if he was never going to be free. He used his dreams and illusions every time he was hurting to help him get away from the pain. This is what kept this little boy alive. He had something to reach for and never quit.

Nechama Tec’s autobiography Dry Tears: The Story of a Lost Childhood tells the narrative of her experiences as a young Jewish girl in Nazi occupied Poland during the second World War. Nechama was able to survive, and protect her family, through the Holocaust by hiding her true identity and pretending to be Polish. She was able to do this because of her blond hair, light skin, blue eyes, and ability to speak unaccented Polish, which made her physically indistinguishable from an “Aryan” child. Nechama Tec’s story emphasizes the themes of identity, cultural assimilation, and passing, both socially and physically, as something that you are not, while also attempting to convey the entirely contradictory, hypocritical,

A person’s childhood very often helps establish who they grow up to be. This idea has proved to be true in the memoir Rocket Boys by Homer H. Hickam. Coalwood, West Virginia was not only Sonny’s hometown, but also an influential character. Coalwood was very uniform and all the citizens took an interest in similar activities during the time-period in which he grew up. For example, "Only coal mining was more important...than high school football. Sputnik, and anything else, was going to always come in a distant third” (Hickam 27). This mentality causes an issue for Sonny, as he aspires to pursue an alternate career in rocket-building. While most of the townspeople are apprehensive of his plans initially, a majority begin to respect his choices

A Childhood: The Biography of a Place by Harry Crews tells the tale of his own childhood growing up. I purposely referred to his biography as a tale because even he could not be sure that everything he has written has happened the way he has written it, due to the fact that he starts out writing about his life ten years prior to his mother giving birth to him and that many recollections do not come from his own memory, but instead a collection of stories he has been told throughout his life. He, however, does in fact alert us quite early on in his novel that everything he has written in this book is what he believes and knows to be true, and that that is enough for him as he searches to find himself. That is why he had chosen to write a

Childhood is usually understood as a set of experiences and behaviours, gained in the early stages of the human existence, considered as the preparation for the adult world. However, the history of childhood is a very complex topic and it has become a very influential area of study in recent years. In 1962, the ‘Centuries of Childhood’ by Philippe Ariés introduced the idea that childhood was a new creation developed in recent centuries and as a concept it was believed to be nonexistent before the seventeenth century. This concept means that there was no awareness of the process of childhood. In several studies of the medieval period, Ariés noticed that childhood was not acknowledged or even attempted to be portrayed during this period. For

Even though childhood has change for the better there is an argument stating that childhood is disappearing “at a dazzling speed” (Postman, 1996) says that there is a closing gap between childhood and adulthood. Neil Postman (1996) claims this in his book “The Disappearance of Childhood”. Postman theory was purely based on the way that communications through technology were made which shapes society today. He thinks that due to the technology such as television and the Internet children nowadays are much likely to have more access to the ‘adult world’, thus childhood to be disappearing (Postman, 1982). He claims its “Frankenstein Syndrome” consequence of the mass media is mainly the responsible for the usage of television, and the social media.

Most psychologists are skeptical of diagnosing antisocial personality disorder in children because they are still developing, thus a diagnosis would typically occur in adulthood. However, in order to be diagnosed with antisocial personality disorder, a person must have dealt with conduct disorders during their childhood. According to psychcentral.com, conduct disorders involve four categories of problem behaviour: Aggression to people and animals Destruction of property Deceitfulness or theft Serious violations of rules or laws (Berger, 2017) As previously stated, Kevin has had behavioural problems his entire life. First, Kevin is aggressive towards any living thing.

Through the eyes of society everyone has a set role they are expected to fulfill and certain characteristics they are supposed to exemplify. These roles and characteristics, this discourse, tells everyone how they should act and speak. For women it is the role of the mother. In our culture, that means raising the children, completing the household chores, and cooking all of the meals to perfection. Women are typical thought of as being demure and polite, small in stature, and submissive to the male gender. In the reverse, men also have certain roles that they are expected to fill and characteristics they are supposed to exemplify. Men are expected to be strong, dominant, and in charge of their families. They are often depicted, both in the media and in life, as the leaders. This discourse that we all follow can frequently be seen in Svava Jakobsdottir’s “A Story for Children.” The short story tells the tale of a woman as she raises her children and takes care of her household. The mother is completely devoted to her children and seeks to fulfill her role in the home to the fullest extent. As the story progresses, the main character slowly has pieces of herself removed by her children: her toe, her brain, and finally her heart. At the end of the text, after all of the children have become adults started families of their own, the mother realizes that she now has nothing and feels useless. In her short story, Jakobsdottir uses dramatization to depict the gender stereotypes and

Social constructionism gives meaning to phenomenon in social context and connections between culture and society build up realities in their circumstances. The studies of this idea have been conducted more than thirty years by a number of North American, British and continental writers (Burr, 1995). However, in childhood studies this notion appears later on. It is mostly held universally, childhood is a stage that biologically existing in human life in early years. It should be considered this childhood is constructed in the society. As a social being, it brings into the mind the relationship between society and child, inevitably. However, the dominant understanding of childhood attributes biological and social

The Secret of Childhood by Maria Montessori Maria Montessori passionately reveals to us the inner workings of children as they develop into their full potential in an effort to assist adults in understanding and supporting this process. The ideas and methods shared have become the foundation for the Montessori model of education. In the introduction, Maria Montessori asserts “there is no real place for children” in today’s modern society where parents are working, cities are crowded and deemed dangerous, and the home is often filled with furnishings off limits to children. We are asked to consider where children feel they belong and are understood. Though Maria believed that great progress was underway when writing this book, with an

The guidelines for Kevin’s behaviour seems to lean towards a desire for independence, he may desire to fend for himself, something that he cannot do whilst in education, though this desire can be seen as positive, encouraging work, it could also be restricting him, as it means he is not reaching what his Head of Year deems to be his full potential (Kendzierski, Whitaker, 1997). Again this desire for independence may be down to his background, he may be told on a regular basis that his father left school early and so he desires to be like him, this would help him assert his