A fully revised and updated second edition of this successful guide to childcare advice in different cultures around the globe.

'Manuals' for new parents illustrating many models of babyhood, shaped by different values and cultures.

Should babies sleep alone in cribs, or in bed with parents? Is talking to babies useful, or a waste of time? A World of Babies provides different answers to these and countless other childrearing questions, precisely because diverse communities around the world hold drastically different beliefs about parenting. While celebrating that diversity, the book also explores the challenges that poverty, globalization and violence pose for parents. Fully updated for the twenty-first century, this edition features a new introduction and eight new or revised case studies that directly address contemporary parenting challenges, from China and Peru to Israel and the West Bank. Written as imagined advice manuals to parents, the creative format of this book brings alive a rich body of knowledge that highlights many models of baby-rearing - each shaped by deeply held values and widely varying cultural contexts. Parenthood may never again seem a matter of 'common sense'.

Although the infant has been a consistent figure in literature (and, for many people, a significant figure in personal life), there’s been little attention focused on infants, or on their place in Canadian fiction, until now. In this book, Sandra Sabatini examines Canadian fiction to trace the ideological charge behind the represented infant. Examining writers from L.M. Montgomery and Frederick Philip Grove to Thomas King and Terry Griggs, Sabatini compares women’s writing about babies with the way infants appear in texts by men over the course of a century. She discovers a range of changing attitudes toward babies. After being seen as a source of financial burden, social shame, or sentimental fantasy, infants have increasingly become a source of value and meaning. The book challenges the perception of babies as passive objects of care and argues for a reading of the infant as a subject in itself. It also reflects upon how the representations of infancy in Canadian literature offer an intriguing portrait of how we imagine ourselves.

Doing theology requires dissension and tenacity. Dissension is required when scriptural texts, and the colonial bodies and traditions (read: Babylon) that capitalize upon those, inhibit or prohibit “rising to life.” With “nerves” to dissent, the attentions of the first cluster of essays extend to scriptures and theologies, to borders and native peoples. The title for the first cluster — “talking back with nerves, against Babylon” — appeals to the spirit of feminist (to talk back against patriarchy) and RastafarI (to chant down Babylon) critics. The essays in the second cluster — titled “persevering with tenacity, through shitstems” — testify that perseverance is possible, and it requires tenacity. Tenacity is required so that the oppressive systems of Babylon do not have the final word. These two clusters are framed by two chapters that set the tone and push back at the usual business of doing theology, inviting engagement with the wisdom and nerves of artists and poets, and two closing chapters that open up the conversation for further dissension and tenacity. Doing theology with dissension and tenacity is unending.

Am I Meant to Become a Parent? Why Can’t I Conceive? What Is My Unborn Child Trying to Tell Me? In this reassuring, supportive, and accessible book, leading clairvoyant and medium Walter Makichen offers guidance to prospective parents eager to create a warm, nurturing environment for their soon-to-be-conceived-or-born children. Applying the wisdom and insights he has gained through twenty years of communicating with these spirit babies, Makichen helps you resolve issues about starting a family…actively participate in the psychic process of creating a child…and move past your worries and fears about becoming parents. From the seven essential chakras that link our body, mind, and spirit to why pregnant women are superpsychic, you’ll discover: * How to create the energy that nurtures spirit babies * How to understand how past lives and chakras relate to your unborn child * The conception contract–what it is and what it means for you and your child * How karmic pairings affect conception and pregnancy * Why miscarriages occur and what they can signify Plus spirit babies and guardian angels…spirit babies and adoption…spirit babies and dreams…and much more Featuring inspirational examples of couples who are now happy parents, as well as breath exercises and healing meditations at the end of each chapter, Spirit Babies tells you everything you need to know to become the parent you were meant to be.

The editors of this book have brought together contributors from many parts of the world. As such, the book offers a truly diverse, international flavour reflecting a broad range of research on babies and toddlers. Examining examples from both Eastern and Western cultures, the book’s overarching focus is on relationships, yielding a coherence beneficial to early childhood researchers and educators alike. Employing visual methodologies to help bring the chapters to life, the varied research studies presented concern babies’ and toddlers’ relationships and cultural contexts. Taken together, they offer a unique opportunity to conceptualise the use of a wholeness approach for studying babies and toddlers – our youngest citizens.