Camden center to promote the study of childhood
Archived article from Oct 27, 2000
By Caroline Yount
The children of South Jersey will benefit from a newly established center on the Camden campus. So will the children of South Philly and South Carolina and South America.
The Center for Children and Childhood Studies will look at children in their own right and let their voices be heard, said Myra Bluebond-Langner, the center’s director and a professor of anthropology. “Children and childhood studies will be to this century what women’s studies was to the last,” she predicted.
The center will promote the study of childhood through research, education, service and community outreach by bringing together an already significant number of Rutgers faculty, students and staff involved with scholarship and service about and for children.
Faculty research projects cover such diverse areas as the history of fetal alcohol syndrome; children’s ideas about God and their religious identity; representations of adoption in literature; and the impact on children and their families of growing up with a chronic and life-threatening illness.
With the help of a grant from the Johnson & Johnson Foundation, the center will expand initiatives in childhood health and illness. One such project, directed by Bluebond-Langner, will examine chronically and terminally ill children’s roles in making decisions about their care and treatment.
Another will assess the impact of enrollment in New Jersey Kidcare (a state-approved program that offers free or low-cost health insurance coverage for children) on children’s health. In the first phase of the project, AmeriCorps volunteers, under the direction of Daniel Hart, associate dean at the Camden College of Arts and Sciences and a professor of psychology, are working in Camden to enroll children in the insurance program.
Psychology Professor J. W. Whitlow Jr. co-directs the center with Bluebond-Langner. He says it is appropriate for the center to be located in Camden, where children make up more than half of the population.
Other projects the center oversees include a campaign for children’s literacy, funded by a $150,000 grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, and the STARR (Sports Teaching Adolescents Responsibility and Resiliency) program, which is directed by Hart and funded in part by Campbell Soup. STARR works with close to 100 minority adolescents, most of whom live in East Camden.
For more information, visit the Web at children.camden.rutgers.edu.
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