Potentials of care: The uncertain politics of social and emotional ability and difference in American childhood

This article examines middle class children's and parents' complex engagements with contemporary practices of cultivation, care and surveillance focused on children's social and emotional capacities and differences. Emblematic of a sociality and emotion-focused biopolitics of childhood, such care provokes moments of spontaneous connection and self-expression for children even as they engage dynamics of disciplining control and normalisation, an outcome that may work against and towards the objectives of care. Moreover, parental investments in social–emotional care reveal adults' conflicted implication in dynamics of child normalisation, and the potential of this form of caretaking to generate politically valuable empathic insight.     

Early Childhood Education Centre Director Perceptions of Challenging Behaviour: Promising Practices and Implications for Professional Development

Given their key role in overall programme quality, it is critical to examine how early childhood programme centre directors in the United States perceive challenging behaviour. Participants completed a survey asking which behaviours they perceive to be most problematic, the number of children dismissed or expelled from the programme during the last year, and the most commonly used strategies for addressing challenging behaviours. Results point to several promising practices and highlight the variability in access to evidence‐based practices based on programme type. Areas that warrant more targeted professional development are discussed, and findings are situated within the larger early childhood context.     

Troubling Discourses of Poverty in Early Childhood in the UK

Poverty in early childhood is pervasive, affecting every aspect of children’s lives. Under current government policies child poverty in the UK is predicted to rise to 40 per cent by 2022. Dominant discourses of poverty have historically focussed on an over‐arching discourse of moral responsibility, essentially relating to notions of deserving and underserving poor. This paper examines how government policy continues to significantly impact on young children and families on low incomes in early childhood and how stigmatised discourses about welfare, work are pervasive. It is argued that discourses of redistribution and children’s rights deserve greater recognition if poverty is to be addressed.     

Addressing inequality: Educators responding to the contexts of young children’s lives?

A child's early relationships and experiences influence their long-term development and learning. In Australia, some children can face complex levels of deprivation when compared to their peers. This study sheds light on how educators are responding. Data analysed consist of individual interviews with early childhood educators working in diverse communities. The findings highlight educators’ accounts of responsiveness as narrowly framed with attention focused on children's cultural heritage which overshadows other equity groups. The paper argues that by becoming sensitive to the contexts of children's lives, there is potential to build the early childhood workforce's capacity for addressing inequalities in childhood.     

Advertising ‘Happy’ Children: The Settler Family,Happiness and the Indigenous Child Removal System

We analyse 4300 advertisements of children featured in the Today's Child column, a daily written by Helen Allen in The Toronto Telegram and The Toronto Star from 1964 to 1982, to understand how the Canadian public became accepting of the adoption of Indigenous children. While children of all ethnic backgrounds were featured, the Indigenous children who were displayed were part of a larger system of child removal, known as the ‘Sixties Scoop’. We demonstrate the ways Indigenous children are described with a specific form of happiness that is conjoined with colonial conceptions of the family and nation.     

Children’s reasoning about unequal gender‐based distributions

Children ages 7 (N = 56, M_age = 7.24, SD = 0.83), 9 (N = 55, M_age = 9.25, SD = 0.52), and 11 (N = 52, M_age = 11.60, SD = 0.79), and emerging adults (N = 50, M_age = 20.76, SD = 0.87) judged distributions of different items to boys and girls, when the items distributed varied by gender valence (related or unrelated to gender norms) and equivalency (equivalent or unequal). Distributions were judged to be acceptable most when the items were consistent with gender norms, especially for participants at ages 7 and 9, indicating that in middle childhood, children judge unequal treatment as fair when it is related to gender norms. Items were judged to be more likable when they were gendered, and likability judgments predicted more positive evaluations of the distributions, even when controlling for age.     

Grandparent support and mental and behavioural health in middle childhood

This study explored the significance of grandparents in middle childhood and assessed the level of grandparental support provided to children in relation to other social network members. The association between grandparental support and grandchildren's mental and behavioural health was also examined. We conducted structured interviews with 120 grade 4 and 5 learners (mean age = 10.41 years) from four schools in Cape Town, South Africa. Results indicated that subsequent to parents, children perceived grandparents as the most important and close relationship category. Furthermore, grandparents provided the highest levels of support to grandchildren after parents. Grandmothers provided more support than grandfathers. No associations between grandparental support and children's internalizing and externalizing behaviours were found. However, results revealed that grandparental support was positively associated with children's prosocial behaviour, independent of child gender, and the amount of support provided by other relationship categories (p = .04). Findings underscore a need for research to move beyond the nuclear family when considering potential influences on children's well‐being.     

Childhood innocence and experience: Memory,discourse and practice

This article examines how childhood innocence is taken up in (92) memories of undergraduate students across four sites in the US and Canada. Drawing from Foucault's theory of discourse, we examine how three themes—innocence as not knowing, innocence as being provided for, and loss of innocence as exposure to adversity—construct childhood as the absence of conflict, which perpetuates the myth of an innocence/experience binary and encourages a deficit perspective of childhood. These findings contribute to teacher education and childhood studies by highlighting the importance of interrogating adult memories in order to disrupt normative assumptions about children.     

Retrospective Paternal and Maternal Parenting Styles,Regulatory Self-Efficacy and Adolescent Risk Taking

This study aims to calculate a scaled risk-taking behavior index and to test a model in which maternal and paternal parenting styles affect risk-taking behavior with a mediation of adolescents’ regulatory self-efficacy. Participants were 816 adolescents (44% males) responding to a self-report questionnaire about their risk-taking behavior, regulatory self-efficacy, and retrospective memories of paternal and maternal parenting styles. Results suggested an item rating in the index showing that behaviors considered less risky referred to alcohol use and the unplanned first sexual intercourse, whereas behaviors considered more risky referred to the lack of use of contraceptives and the age of the first sexual intercourse. Results revealed a significant indirect effect of authoritative and authoritarian styles on risk-taking behavior. These styles shaped the adolescents’ regulatory self-efficacy, which in turn predicted adolescent risk-taking behavior. Results underline the complex interplay of relationships between parents and their children.