This book is filled with practical, proven strategies, effective tools, and inspiring stories designed to help adults shape and improve connections with kids.

How young people think about the moral and ethical dilemmas they encounter when they share and use online content and participate in online communities. Fresh from a party, a teen posts a photo on Facebook of a friend drinking a beer. A college student repurposes an article from Wikipedia for a paper. A group of players in a multiplayer online game routinely cheat new players by selling them worthless virtual accessories for high prices. In Disconnected, Carrie James examines how young people and the adults in their lives think about these sorts of online dilemmas, describing ethical blind spots and disconnects. Drawing on extensive interviews with young people between the ages of 10 and 25, James describes the nature of their thinking about privacy, property, and participation online. She identifies three ways that young people approach online activities. A teen might practice self-focused thinking, concerned mostly about consequences for herself; moral thinking, concerned about the consequences for people he knows; or ethical thinking, concerned about unknown individuals and larger communities. James finds, among other things, that youth are often blind to moral or ethical concerns about privacy; that attitudes toward property range from “what's theirs is theirs” to “free for all”; that hostile speech can be met with a belief that online content is “just a joke”; and that adults who are consulted about such dilemmas often emphasize personal safety issues over online ethics and citizenship. Considering ways to address the digital ethics gap, James offers a vision of conscientious connectivity, which involves ethical thinking skills but, perhaps more important, is marked by sensitivity to the dilemmas posed by online life, a motivation to wrestle with them, and a sense of moral agency that supports socially positive online actions.

How can we prepare teachers and youth workers to better reach and engage youth? How can we connect the disconnected? What must be done to help young people connect to workforce and educational programs? With 5.5 million disconnected youth in the United States and millions more just struggling to hang on, Edward DeJesus, one of the country's brightest minds in youth development paints a picture of what must be done to connect millions of youth to opportunities beyond the streets. In 290 pages DeJesus reveals the secrets to youth engagement that every organization and professional must master.

Contents: (1) Introduction; (2) Background; (3) Overview of Research on Disconnected Youth: Methodology and Number of Disconnected Youth; Other Characteristics; Reasons Associated with Disconnection; (4) Analysis of Disconnected Youth: (a) Overview; Limitations; (b) Findings: Reasons Reported for Youth Not Being in School or Working; Characteristics of Disconnected Youth; Characteristics of Parents Living with Disconnected Youth; Trends Over Time; (5) Discussion: Overview; Poverty, Family Living Arrangements, and Parental Characteristics; Implications for Policy. Charts and tables.

As the chapters in this volume demonstrate, young, disadvantaged men from urban neighborhoods face a unique set of challenges and constraints as they transition to adulthood. Yet, these challenges are not always contained by place. Research among Latino and White disadvantaged men in nonurban settings highlights the pressures that come along with fatherhood for disadvantaged men. In contrast to popular understandings of absent or disengaged fathers, findings reveal how fatherhood and increasing levels of interdependence during early adulthood can buffer men as they make the difficult transition to adulthood. The innovative field-based research featured in this volume illuminates the contexts, processes, and meanings in life pathways for disadvantaged men as they move from adolescence into adulthood and should help to inform policies and practices directed at minimizing their marginalization from mainstream society. This is the 143rd volume in this series. Its mission is to provide scientific and scholarly presentations on cutting edge issues and concepts in child and adolescent development. Each volume focuses on a specific new direction or research topic and is edited by experts in that field.