A Very Short Fact: On this day in 1959, the United Nations adopted the Declaration of the Rights of the Child, an expansion of the document first adopted by the League of Nations in 1924, in an attempt to protect and promote child rights all over the world.

“In addition to direct aid to children and their families, the United Nations has passed resolutions and initiated treaties establishing and attempting to enforce children’s rights. Going far beyond the 1924 and 1959 declarations, the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child offered a wide-ranging affirmation that the best interests of the child should guide all policies and decisions regarding childhood. The convention’s forty articles reflect all of the concerns, values, and issues that had swirled around the idea of childhood throughout the previous century, including health, education, freedom of speech and religion, and the right to a name and nationality. The UN’s Committee on the Rights of the Child oversees the enforcement of its provisions. Although the United States was involved in the drafting of the convention, it remained the only nation not to have ratified it as of 2017. Although the convention’s many qualifications made it sound like an agreement among lawyers recognizing the complications of trying to issue dictums applicable to dozens of political and legal systems, it had far more teeth than other efforts to provide protection for all the world’s children.

In addition to primary care programs related to nutrition and health, the UN has worked to eliminate child marriage, provide standards for children’s rights within families and the treatment of refugees, eliminate child prostitution and child pornography, and discourage the exploitation of children in armed conflicts. Despite these efforts, and the decided improvements they brought to millions of children’s lives, economic, military, and environmental conditions keep many children in distress. In 2000 an estimated 100 million school-age children were out of school, 50 million were working in harsh conditions, 30 million were involved in sex trades, 150 million were malnourished, and millions more had been orphaned by or suffered from AIDS.” — From ‘The History of Childhood: A Very Short Introduction’ by James Marten

[Pg. 105-6 — From ‘The History of Childhood: A Very Short Introduction’ by James Marten.]

Image via Wikimedia Commons.

December 2nd is Special Education Day.  Dr. Bryna Siegel, author of “The Politics of Autism”, explains how children with autism learn differently, and argues for the important of autism-specific curriculum.

GIF by Nicole Piendel for Oxford University Press 

Adoption, especially international adoption, is surrounded by stigma of how the process affects the child and their new family. Looking at the brain at a neurological level can help explain why adoptees and adopters go through certain challenges, and show what opportunities adoption can provide.

Learn why international adoption does not deserve the stigma it has earned through Rebecca Compton’s first-hand account of her own adoption journey as she visited a Kazakhstani orphanage daily for nearly a year.

Image created by Stephanie King for Oxford University Press

“A long standing debate in research pertaining to deaf education is whether deaf children read in the same way as hearing children and, in particular, whether they use phonology when reading. Hearing children typically utilize the relationships between letters and sounds when learning to read and spell…. Although deaf children have incomplete access to auditory phonological information, there are alternate ways through which spoken phonology can be accessed visually, including speech reading (silent lipreading), cued speech, or visual phonics.”

Phonological awareness, Speech-reading and Deaf children’s reading

Image credit: book cup childhood mug by Annie Spratt. Public domain via Unsplash.

“With the implementation of newborn hearing screenings in a growing number of countries, children who are hard of hearing have their hearing loss identified at an earlier age than before. When identified early, they can also receive intervention that supports their development. However, we know less about early intervention for children who are hard of hearing than we know about deaf children (those with greater hearing losses).”

Early intervention for children who are hard of hearing

Image credit: Ears lobe sound listen by tung256. Public domain via Pixabay..

“Eating fruit and vegetables (FVs) can protect against obesity and reduce the risk of mortality from cardiovascular disease. Despite this, children across much of the developed world do not meet the recommendations for daily intake of FVs…studies have identified a number of parental factors associated with increases in children’s intake of FVs, including parent intake, parent providing fruit and vegetables to children, structured family mealtimes, setting rules around eating, and the availability and accessibility of FVs in the home.”

Will targeting parents in nutrition interventions be an effective strategy for increasing children’s fruit and vegetable intake?

Image credit: watermelon summer by jill111. Public domain via Pixabay.

Philip Nel, author of Was the Cat in the Hat Black? The Hidden Racism of Children’s Literature, and the Need for Diverse Books, gets serious about the need for representation in children’s literature.