Child and Youth Studies

A comprehensive reader exploring global child and youth studies.

Child and Youth Studies: A Reader is an invaluable tool for instructors and students who take courses on children and youth. This book collects 55 readings across 11 topic sections into a single, legally compliant volume. Edited by Ingrid E. Castro, a sociologist and editor of four prior collected volumes on childhood, this reader spans scholarship from the 1990s through the 2020s.

Organized thematically, the reader covers approaches to child and youth studies, core theories and concepts, methodologies, emotions and bodies, families, education, environments, ethnicities and migration, identities, popular culture and play, and future directions. Each section concludes with five in-class/out-of-class exercises. All included works draw on qualitative and participatory methods featuring diverse authors and children from around the globe.

Readers will also find:

• Research spanning child and youth geographies, socioemotional well-being, peer cultures, caring relationships, sexualities, surveillance, violence, and activism
• Classic and contemporary scholarship selected to represent diverse voices and global perspectives on childhood and youth experiences
• Qualitative and participatory methodologies that foreground children's and young people's own accounts of their lives and social worlds
• Compliance with current copyright and accessible content laws, eliminating the need for instructor-assembled course packets
• Fifty-five exercises designed to extend classroom discussion and deepen student engagement with each thematic section

Designed for undergraduate courses in sociology, child and youth studies, education, anthropology, social work, and child development, this reader provides instructors with a ready-made, thematically organized collection that replaces ad hoc course packets. Child and Youth Studies: A Reader gives students access to foundational and recent scholarship reflecting the global scope of child and youth studies.

Ingrid E. Castro, PhD, is Professor of Sociology at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts, where she specializes in childhood and youth research. She holds a PhD in Sociology from Northeastern University with graduate certificates in Cinema Studies and Women & Gender Studies. She has edited four collected volumes on children and youth, covering methodological innovations and agency in popular culture, science fiction, and fantasy. She is a former chair of the American Sociological Association’s (ASA) Children and Youth Section, and in 2026 became the founder of ASA’s newest section—Creative Sociology.