The good life for children: Do we really care about the trends?

How do we know if Australian children and young people are having a ‘good life‘? What about their lives compared to children and young people in other countries? To answer these questions, the Australian Research Alliance for Children and Youth (ARACY) produced a Report Card to compare Australian average, Indigenous Australian average, and international or Organisation for Economic Co‐operation and Development (OECD) average for a number of measures of child and youth wellbeing. The ARACY Report Card shows that Australian results are average when compared to other OECD countries in most areas of child and youth wellbeing. Most importantly for nearly all indicators, Indigenous Australian children fare substantially less well than the Australian average and the majority of children in other countries. It is argued that community attitudes and behaviours toward children and young people, and our society's focus on wealth creation, are detrimental to children's and young people's wellbeing. The need for a better balance between economic progress and a socially and environmentally sustainable society is discussed, along with a strategy to better meet the emotional needs of children and young people.     

Children's Agency: ‘Getting By,Getting Back,Getting Out and Getting Organised’ Under Welfare‐to‐Work in Australia

One in four children in lone‐parent households in Australia lives in poverty. Welfare‐to‐work policies designed to 'activate' lone‐parents into the labour market is one approach that successive governments have employed to address this issue. This article argues that activation policies that target parents risk overlooking the implications for the children in these families. It concludes that more understanding about how poor children employ agency within the constraints and conditions of their lives could inform policy that better supports their well‐being, values their contributions, and is more sensitive to the diverse and changing needs of families. It draws on child‐centred participatory research with twenty‐six children in Australia that found they were active agents across a range of areas that included strategies for getting by, aspiration for the future, and acts of resistance.     

Using Qualitative Methods with Poor Children in Urban Ethiopia: Opportunities &; Challenges

This paper discusses the advantages and challenges of using qualitative methods to elicit poor children’s perspectives about threats and positive influences on their wellbeing. It draws on research carried out by the author on the subjective experiences of poor children in Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia in terms of their understandings of wellbeing, threats to their wellbeing, coping strategies, and positive or resilient outcomes. After a brief introduction reviewing previous approaches to child poverty in general and research on Ethiopian children in particular, the second section describes the research setting and the ethical approach to the study, which influenced how consent was obtained and the data analysed. The paper then describes the use of qualitative methods such as semi-structured interviews, draw-and-tell, and diaries, the kinds of data they produced and the methodological and ethical dilemmas and tensions encountered in using them. It concludes that despite the challenges qualitative methods are invaluable in order to understand what poor children see as threats and positive influences on their wellbeing.

Children's time in structured and unstructured leisure activities

Using the 1981 Time Use Longitudinal Panel Study data, this study examines factors which influence children's time use in leisure activities. More time is spent in unstructured than structured leisure activities. Analysis of variance is performed on 32 categories of leisure time, including total leisure, to determine the influence of characteristics of the child and the mother and other socioeconomic characteristics. Males spend significantly more time than females in active sports, playing games, and passive leisure especially watching television on weekends. Females spend significantly more time than males socializing on weekends. The amount of time spent socializing increases with age but decreases with employment. Time spent playing games decreases with age, increases with number of children, and decreases as family income increases. Given the large number of children who do not participate in a given set of leisure activities, future research should examine the probability of participation.The data used in this article were made available by the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research. The data for Time Use Longitudinal Panel Study, 1975–1981 were originally collected by F. Thomas Juster, Martha S. Hill, Frank P. Stafford, and Jacquelynne Eccles Parsons of the Survey Research Center, Institute for Social Research, The University of Michigan. Neither the collector of the original data nor the Consortium bear any responsibility for the analysis or interpretation presented here.Carol B. Meeks is a Professor and Teresa Mauldin is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Housing and Consumer Economics, The University of Georgia, Athens, GA 30602. Dr. Meeks' research interests include time use, family structure, and economic aspects of housing. She received her Ph.D. from Ohio State University. Dr. Mauldin, who also received her Ph.D. from Ohio State University, is interested in time use, economic well being of individuals and families, and family structure.     

童心·童趣·童言——李建树、杨明火儿童文学创作论

在浙东当代儿童作家中,李建树和杨明火是以其成果丰硕、风格独具及名闻遐迩而成为最具代表性的作家.他们在探索欣悦纯真的童心、追求幽默隽永的童趣和铸造活泼本色的童言等诸方面各有独特而鲜明的艺术个性.同时,当代儿童的时代精神面貌,风格化的地域文化色彩和作家自身的艺术气质都融注在他们的作品中成为这两位作家具魅力的标志性特征.     

关系“内卷化”与价值观的建构——以“流动儿童”为研究对象

本文尝试用“内卷化”的概念分析流动儿童价值观的建构问题，文章通过四个案别的比较得出，流动儿童关系“内卷化”对其价值观的建构起到了阻碍作用，建议提供流动儿童与城市儿童沟通交流的平台，让其在互动过程中形成自己的价值观。     

Ehrenberg law-like relationship and anthropometry

Summary. Ehrenberg presented the simple law-like relationship log( w )=0.8 h  + 0.4 ± 0.04 between the weight and height of children aged 5–13 years. Several researchers have confirmed that this relationship holds, irrespective of the child's ethnic, racial, gender and social class. In anthropometry, a weight–height relationship is used to measure the nutritional status of children. For this purpose, the World Health Organization have adopted the National Center for Health Statistics population as the international reference population. The relationship between the World Health Organization–National Center for Health Statistics anthropometric standards and Ehrenberg law-like relationship is examined. Differences between the weight-for-height relationship in anthropometry and the law-like relationship between weight and height for children are small and can be attributable to functional differences. It is found that an Ehrenberg law-like relationship can be extended to include children who are under 5 years old. Criteria for using the law-like relationship to assess the nutritional status of these children are thus suggested. The criteria are evaluated using anthropometric data of a sample of 513 children from a rural district of Botswana. The results indicate that the proposed method of using the law-like relationship to assess nutritional status is much simpler and at least as reliable as the existing methods in anthropometry.     

Rhetoric or reality? An economic analysis of the effects of religion in Sweden

On the basis of simple rational-choice theory, it is argued that Christian religious involvement influences the divorce, abortion, non-payment, and children-born-out-of-wedlock rates negatively. This influence stems from an expectation that a god punishes certain forms of action and from social reprimands of devotees. Regression analysis is then used to test the theory in the case of Sweden in the year 1990, and the importance of religion, in its negative effect on all of these rates, is strongly confirmed. A particularly interesting result: the marginal effect on three of these rates of increasing the fraction of people active in the Church of Sweden is clearly larger than the marginal effect of increasing the fraction of more conservative free-church members.     

The use of savings as a family resource management strategy to meet child rearing costs

This study examines the effect of children on family savings decisions over the life cycle. The model used is a multinomial logit budget share allocation model. The data are from the 1982 Canadian Family Expenditure Survey Data. Results indicate that the addition of a child to a family results in fewer assets being accumulated than if the child was not present. As much as 43% of direct child rearing costs may be met through this substitution out of future consumption. Closer analysis reveals that accrual of housing equity is relatively unaffected by child's presence and that substitutions occur primarily out of other types of savings instruments.The authors would like to acknowledge financial support from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada (Grant #1498-85-0005), the Department of Consumer Science, University of Wisconsin, Madison and the College of Home Economics, University of Saskatchewan. However, all opinions expressed are our own and do not necessarily reflect the views of our sponsors. Special thanks is due Susan Bruns for outstanding research and computer programming assistance. The authors accept responsibility for any errors or omissions. All correspondence should be directed to Prof. Douthitt at 1300 Linden Drive, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin 53706.Robin A. Douthitt received her Ph.D. from Cornell University. She is an Associate Professor, Department of Consumer Science and the Institute for Research on Poverty, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI 53706. Her research interests include the relationship between child support awards and child rearing costs, and family time use.Joanne M. Fedyk received her M.S. from the University of Saskatchewan. She is currently an Assistant Professor in the College of Home Economics, University of Saskatchewan S7N OWO, Canada. Her research interests include both the cost of raising children and the valuation of homemaking services.     

基于儿童视角的幼儿绘本选择偏好研究

从儿童视角出发,通过马赛克的方法倾听山西某幼儿园大、中、小班幼儿对绘本选择时的意见,运用NVivo12定性分析软件对原始资料进行编码和分析。研究发现:幼儿对绘本的偏好主要受内部体验、情节、自身兴趣与经验以及角色形象等因素的影响,除此之外绘本的封面和题材在一定程度上影响幼儿对绘本的态度,而艺术风格、造型、图画技法、开本对幼儿绘本选择的影响较低。最后对幼儿绘本选择偏好的总体特点以及“儿童参与”的困境进行了分析讨论,并从绘本的创作者和传递者两个不同的主体提出可能的突破策略:绘本创作者:倾听幼儿的声音,理解幼儿的需求;绘本传递者:重视幼儿的参与,构建发展共同体。