Many parents are waking up to the fact that parenting is not about controlling their children, but about empowering themselves and their children. 9 Ways to Bring Out the Best in You and Your Child is about turning power struggles into powerful relationships. It is about raising children who are full of spirit and life, and about teaching them to be caring human beings. Maggie Reigh teaches that parenting is a matter of the heart. Combining profound insights with practical ideas, Reigh shows parents how to raise respectful, responsible, and resilient children, and at the same time, add more life and laughter to their children's lives and their own. This is a book about raising children full of spirit and life, and teaching them to be caring human beings.

Forced by their jet-setting parents to spend the weekend at the opulent Weekend Retreat-the most beautiful and expensive child retreat in the country-Maya, Zack, and Bryan believe they are in for another boring weekend spent amid the other offspring of the socially elite. But their lives are changed forever when they come away not remembering anything that happened the whole time they were there. When news arrives that their parents have been killed, the children are given into full custody of Weekend Retreat and Maya becomes a prisoner for almost ten years. She has to work long hours with very little to eat, and the horror that she witnesses and duties that she has to perform are unthinkable. Finally, at eighteen, she is able to leave with nothing but the clothes on her back. But where are her brothers? She finally locates Zack and they embark on a risky covert operation to investigate Weekend Retreat and discover what is behind the gruesome surgeries and mysterious disappearances. Will someone recognize them? Will they come out alive, and discover what happened to their older brother? Or will Zack and Maya be forever trapped at the dark and dangerous Weekend Retreat. Join author Brenda Hyslip for a moving story of greed, hope, faith, fear, and incredible courage.

This unique resource expertly details the design, installation, and maintenance of sustainable children's landscapes and play yards. Numerous case studies cover projects including storybook courtyards, music and barnyard gardens, nature trails, wildlife habitats, memorial, and edible gardens.

Exploring the ethical questions posed by, in, and about children’s literature, this collection examines the way texts intended for children raise questions of value, depict the moral development of their characters, and call into attention shared moral presuppositions. The essays in Part I look at various past attempts at conveying moral messages to children and interrogate their underlying assumptions. What visions of childhood were conveyed by explicit attempts to cultivate specific virtues in children? What unstated cultural assumptions were expressed by growing resistance to didacticism? How should we prepare children to respond to racism in their books and in their society? Part II takes up the ethical orientations of various classic and contemporary texts, including 'prosaic ethics' in the Hundred Acre Wood, moral discernment in Narnia, ethical recognition in the distant worlds traversed by L’Engle, and virtuous transgression in recent Anglo-American children’s literature and in the emerging children’s literature of 1960s Taiwan. Part III’s essays engage in ethical criticism of arguably problematic messages about our relationship to nonhuman animals, about war, and about prejudice. The final section considers how we respond to children’s literature with ethically focused essays exploring a range of ways in which child readers and adult authorities react to children’s literature. Even as children’s literature has evolved in opposition to its origins in didactic Sunday school tracts and moralizing fables, authors, parents, librarians, and scholars remain sensitive to the values conveyed to children through the texts they choose to share with them.

Previous studies on the acquisition of verb inflection in normally developing children have revealed an astonishing pattern: children use correctly inflected verbs in their own speech but fail to make use of verb inflections when comprehending sentences uttered by others. Thus, a three-year old might well be able to say something like ‘The cat sleeps on the bed’, but fails to understand that the same sentence, when uttered by another person, refers to only one sleeping cat but not more than one. The previous studies that have examined children's comprehension of verb inflections have employed a variant of a picture selection task in which the child was asked to explicitly indicate (via pointing) what semantic meaning she had inferred from the test sentence. Recent research on other linguistic structures, such as pronouns or focus particles, has indicated that earlier comprehension abilities can be found when methods are used that do not require an explicit reaction, like preferential looking tasks. This dissertation aimed to examine whether children are truly not able to understand the connection the the verb form and the meaning of the sentence subject until the age of five years or whether earlier comprehension can be found when a different measure, preferential looking, is used. Additionally, children's processing of subject-verb agreement violations was examined. The three experiments of this thesis that examined children's comprehension of verb inflections revealed the following: German-speaking three- to four-year old children looked more to a picture showing one actor when hearing a sentence with a singular inflected verb but only when their eye gaze was tracked and they did not have to perform a picture selection task. When they were asked to point to the matching picture, they performed at chance-level. This pattern indicates asymmetries in children's language performance even within the receptive modality. The fourth experiment examined sensitivity to subject-verb agreement violations and did not reveal evidence for sensitivity toward agreement violations in three- and four-year old children, but only found that children's looking patterns were influenced by the grammatical violations at the age of five. The results from these experiments are discussed in relation to the existence of a production-comprehension asymmetry in the use of verb inflections and children's underlying grammatical knowledge.