Promise or Problem? A Review of the Literature on Men Working in Early Childhood Services

Few men care for, or teach, young children. The 1991 UK census found that less than 1% of nursery nurses were male, while 14% of nursery/primary teachers were male. A similarly gendered picture can be found across European, North American and Australian studies of early childhood services, such as childcare centres and early education. The practice and prospect of men early childhood workers are both encouraged and resisted. The aim of this article is to review the international literature relevant to men working in early childhood services with pre‐school‐aged children. The case for male early childhood workers is reviewed: two pertinent themes from the related field of men working in non‐traditional occupations are highlighted. The review considers how these are applied to the specific context of men and early childhood services. Four aspects of the debate about men and early childhood work are examined: gender stereotypes; senior positions; gendered motives; and risks, allegations and protection. The literature suggests that men's careers have much to gain from working in early childhood services, but that, certainly in the Anglo‐American literature, a recurring theme is the representation of men early childhood workers as a source of suspicion.     

Evaluation of the effectiveness of a pilot program that promotes sensitive response in the educational staff of Chilean nursery schools

The relationship between the sensitive response of the caregiver and the formation of secure attachments in infants has been widely studied. It is within this framework that the present investigation examined the effect of an intervention that promotes sensitive response in nursery school caregivers. The intervention took place in early education centers for children between 0 and 2 years of age, from a low socio-economic background and identified as being at psychosocial risk. Using the Care Index (Crittenden, 1985), 53 nursery school caregivers were evaluated at the beginning, middle and end of the intervention. The results indicate a significant increase in the sensitive response of the participants as much at the middle as at the end of the intervention. This study discusses the implications of the results for early childhood education, especially, in cases where the child is identified as being in psychosocial risk.     

Time,Space and Gender: Understanding ‘Problem’ Behaviour in Young Children

The following article reports on a small‐scale, exploratory study of aggressive and ‘problem’ behaviour in pre‐school children. This project was conceived in the wider context of anxieties about childhood and New Labour’s policy focus on ‘anti‐social’ behaviour in children. Based on interviews with nursery staff and parents in addition to participant observation undertaken in nursery playrooms, this article examines the relevance of time, space and gender for understanding problem behaviour in young children. Taking a social constructionist perspective and drawing on Foucault's ideas in particular, it examines the social processes which regulate and normalise behaviour in young children. © 2006 The Author(s) Journal compilation © 2006 National Children's Bureau.     

Tracing the development of deficit perspectives in family programs

A historical review of parent involvement in kindergarten, day nurseries, nursery school, Head Start and subsequent at-risk early childhood programs from 1856–1995, and family literacy programs from 1986–1995 reveals that attitudes toward poverty, language and developmental ideology are major factors in the development of deficit perspectives of low-income, non-mainstream families. The authors assert that both overt and covert deficit perspectives toward low-income families have prevented early intervention programs from fully serving the needs of families. Theoretical and practical implications for those involved in family programs are included.     

Continuity and discontinuity in the politics of the sixties generation: A reassessment

This paper reassesses the sources of sixties generation college graduates' liberal and radical politics through a reanalysis of General Social Survey and National Election Study data from the early 1970s to the early 1980s. Results of regression and ordered probit analyses of political attitude data do not sit well with the conventional view that the additive effects of education and membership of a particularly liberal generation explain sixties generation college graduates' politics. Instead, on some issues, the politics of sixties generation college graduates is discontinuous both with other groups in the early 1970s and with their own politics in the early 1980s. On attitudes to business and attitudes to state welfare spending, sixties generation college graduates were more liberal than the additive effects of their education and cohort membership can explain in the early 1970s. Moreover, they became substantially more conservative compared to other groups by the early 1980s on these issues. On other issues, notably social issues and attitudes to state consumption spending, this pattern of discontinuity was not found. Possible interpretations of these results are discussed.     

Experimenting with dialogue on Twitter: An examination of the influence of the dialogic principles on engagement,interaction, and attitude

Much of the public relations research on online relationship building has examined social media content for the use of the dialogic principles outlined by Kent and Taylor (1998). These studies, using content analysis as the primary methodology, have found that the dialogic capabilities of social media are under-utilized. However, there is limited research on the effectiveness of these methods. Therefore, the goal of this study is to examine the influence of social media content utilizing these principles on engagement, interactivity, and attitude. Results of this study indicate that usefulness of information can have a significant influence on engagement and attitude.     

The road to conventional tool use: Developmental changes in children's material engagement with artifacts in nursery school

The development of tool use in early childhood is a topic of continuing interest in developmental psychology. However, the lack of studies in ecological settings results in many unknowns about how children come to use artifacts according to their cultural function. We report a longitudinal study with 17 sociodemographically diverse children (8 female) attending a nursery school in Madrid (Spain) and their two adult female teachers. Using mixed-effects models and Granger causality analysis, we measured changes in the frequency and duration of children's object uses between 7 and 17 months of age and in the directional influences among pairs of behaviors performed by teachers and children. Results show a clear shift in how children use artifacts. As early as 12 months of age, the frequency of conventional uses outweighs that of all other types of object use. In addition, object uses become shorter in duration with age, irrespective of their type. Moreover, certain teachers' nonlinguistic communicative strategies (e.g., demonstrations of canonical use and placing gestures) significantly influence and promote children's conventional tool use. Findings shed light on how children become increasingly proficient in conventional tool use through interactions with artifacts and others in nursery school.     

Human nature and neurosciences: a methodical cultural criticism of naturalism in the neurosciences

In its predominant form, the understanding of the neurosciences, which stand in high public esteem, is a naturalistic one. The critique of this naturalism concerns the technical modelling of brain functions as a syntactic or control loop machine. Adequate solutions to the mind-body problem are not found in this way.An alternative exists in the shape of the methodical-culturalistic approach, which describes the neurosciences as human practice, modelled on the pragmatism of medicine: Starting from (diagnosed and described) defects, the medical practitioner searches for the causes of the disorder.The neuroscientists naïve focus on the central nervous system is replaced by the reflection on the actions and objectives of the neuroscientist himself. This results in a number of conclusions with regard to human/animal comparisons and to the importance of brain research for the self-image of human beings, for instance concerning free will.

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Zusammenfassung Das Verständnis der öffentlich hoch geschätzten Neurowissenschaften ist in vorherrschender Form naturalistisch. Kritik an diesem Naturalismus betrifft die technische Modellierung von Hirnfunktionen als syntaktische oder als Regelkreis-Maschine. Adäquate Lösungen des Geist-Körper-Problems werden dadurch nicht gewonnen.Eine Alternative bietet der methodisch-kulturalistische Ansatz zur Beschreibung der Neurowissenschaften als menschliche Praxis. Der Pragmatismus der Medizin bietet hierfür ein Vorbild: Ausgehend von (erkannten und beschriebenen) Defekten wird nach Störursachen gesucht.Der naive Blick des Neurowissenschaftlers auf das Zentrale Nervensystem wird ersetzt durch die Reflexion auf die Handlungen und Ziele des Neurowissenschaftlers selbst. Daraus ergeben sich einige Folgerungen zum Mensch-Tier-Vergleich und zur Tragweite der Hirnforschung für das menschliche Selbstverständnis etwa hinsichtlich der Willensfreiheit.

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Résumé La compréhension des neurosciences tenues en haute estime par le public est naturaliste dans sa forme prédominante. La critique formulée à lencontre de ce naturalisme concerne le modelage technique des fonctions du cerveau en tant que machine syntactique ou à circuits de régulation. Il ne permet pas daboutir à des solutions appropriées sur le problème du corps et de lesprit.La démarche méthodologique culturaliste servant à décrire les neurosciences comme pratique humaine présente une alternative. Le pragmatisme de la médecine propose ici un modèle : à partir de défauts (identifiés et reconnus), on recherche les causes de la perturbation.Le regard naïf du neuroscientifique sur le système nerveux central est remplacé par une réflexion sur les actes et les objectifs du neuroscientifique lui-même. Il en résulte quelques déductions sur la comparaison homme-animal et sur la portée de la recherche sur le cerveau pour la compréhension humaine de soi, par exemple en ce qui concerne la liberté de la volonté.

     

The Timing of Family Instability and Children’s Social Development

This study extends the growing literature of family instability by investigating the significance of its timing for children’s social adjustment. We find that more than a third of the 1,364 elementary school children in the NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development experienced some family structure change. Their cumulative level of family instability was associated with multiple indicators of social development at the end of elementary school, associations that were especially strong for boys. These associations were driven largely by the lasting effect of family change in early childhood, demonstrating the significance of early family instability for children’s later social development.     

Participation as a means of enhancing the legitimacy of decisions on technology? A sceptical analysis

The legitimacy of technology as a whole, of individual fields of technology, and of concrete decisions on technology has become problematic. Traditional methods and elements for the legitimization of technological development and of the application of technology have been increasingly called into question since the 1980s. There are great expectations in participatory procedures to improving the legitimization of technology decisions. Those expectations, however, might not be justified. In the paper, the hypothesis is proposed that legitimacy can be brought about through participation only under conditions that require the fulfillment of a number of preconditions, which often cannot be regarded as fulfilled. The unavoidable separation between internal communication among the participants and external communication with the nonparticipants turns out to be the fundamental structural characteristic hindering naïve expectations of improving legitimacy by participation.

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Zusammenfassung Die Legitimität von Technik als Ganzem, von einzelnen Technikfeldern und von konkreten Technikentscheidungen ist heute problematisch. Traditionelle Methoden und Elemente für die Legitimierung technischer Entwicklungen und der Anwendung von Technik werden seit den Achtzigerjahren immer mehr in Frage gestellt. Nun setzt man große Erwartungen in partizipatorische Prozeduren, die die Legitimierung von Technikentscheidungen verbessern sollen, Erwartungen, die jedoch möglicherweise nicht gerechtfertigt sind. In diesem Beitrag stellen wir die Hypothese zur Diskussion, dass Partizipation nur unter Umständen zu Legitimität führen kann, die voraussetzen, dass bestimmte Vorbedingungen erfüllt sind, was jedoch oft nicht der Fall ist. Die unvermeidliche Trennung zwischen interner Kommunikation unter den Teilnehmern und externer Kommunikation mit den Nichtteilnehmern erweist sich als das grundlegende strukturelle Merkmal, das der Erfüllung naiver Erwartungen hinsichtlich einer erhöhten Legitimität durch Partizipation im Weg steht.

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Résumé La légitimité de la technologie en tant que tout, de domaines technologiques particuliers et de décisions technologiques concrètes est aujourdhui problématique. Les méthodes et les éléments traditionnels de légitimation des développements technologiques sont depuis les années quatre-vingts de plus en plus remis en question. On fonde à présent de grands espoirs dans les procédures participatives, qui doivent améliorer la légitimation des décisions technologiques, un espoir qui nest cependant peut-être pas justifié. Dans cet article, nous discutons lhypothèse selon laquelle la participation ne peut mener à la légitimité que dans des conditions impliquant à leur tour que certains préalables soient remplis, ce qui nest souvent pas le cas. La séparation inévitable entre la communication interne entre participants et la communication externe avec les nonparticipants savère une caractéristique structurelle fondamentale faisant obstacle à laccomplissement dattentes naïves pour ce qui est dune légitimité accrue par la participation.

     

Children's Development as Participation in Everyday Practices across Different Institutions

Children participate in different institutional collectives in their everyday life. Home, school, and kindergarten are the institutional contexts that most children share. Although there are variations between home practices and school practices, they collectively share a common core framed by societal conditions. In drawing upon Vygotsky's (1998) Vygotsky, L. S. 1998. The collected works of L. S. Vygotsky (M. J. Hall, Trans., Vol. 5, Child Psychology), New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum.  [Google Scholar] theory of the social situation of development and Hedegaard's (2009) Hedegaard, M. 2009. “Children's development from a cultural-historical approach: Children's activity in everyday local settings as foundation for their development”. In Mind, Culture, and Activity Vol. 16, 64–82. [Taylor & Francis Online] , [Google Scholar] theory of development conceptualised as the child's participation within and across several institutions at the same time, it has been possible to examine how school practices influence home practice and the child's social situation of development. A case study of an Australian child's participation across different institutions (family and school) was undertaken to capture and analyse the dynamic processes through which development was afforded. In the case study there was a large disjunction between institutional practices of the home and school that the child had to negotiate. Due to teacher knowledge of only the child's relation to the school institution, and not the home institution, the affordances for development and the child's changing relations to his environment, were invisible to the educators in this study. The findings suggest foregrounding an understanding of children's development as changes in children's activities and thereby changing their relations to reality across institutional practices in order to support a broader view of development in early childhood education.     

Temporal effects of distressed housing on early childhood risk factors and kindergarten readiness

Poor housing quality and housing crises have been linked to adverse outcomes for children. However, few studies have focused on the early childhood period or been able to pinpoint how the timing and duration of housing problems contributes to early educational success. This longitudinal study draws on linked administrative records from housing, education, social service and health agencies to examine the influence of exposure to housing neighborhood conditions since birth on school readiness of all children entering kindergarten over a four-year period in a big city school system. Using marginal structural models that properly account for dynamic housing and neighborhood selection, we find that children exposed to problematic housing and disadvantaged neighborhoods have lower kindergarten readiness scores after accounting for other factors. The negative effects of housing problems on kindergarten readiness are partially mediated by child maltreatment incidences, residential instability, and elevated blood lead levels. Communities are advised to pay more attention to distressed housing as a cause of disparities in early child development and school readiness.     

Are there homeless youth in my community? Differences of perception between service providers and high school youth

While teen homelessness, like all homelessness, is increasing, there have been few solid estimates of the actual number of teens effected. A twofold methodology to count homeless teens was used in the Seacoast region of New Hampshire and Maine. Social service agencies were contacted to obtain a count of homeless adolescents, and over 3000 high school age teens were surveyed in the seacoast of New Hampshire and southwestern Maine to identify how many were homeless. By using different definitions of homelessness, it was found that a minimum of 5% of all teens in high school reported that they had been homeless sometime during the past year. When using a broadened definition of homelessness, it was found that 20% of the teens regularly stayed with others. However, this experience was not identified by social service providers, who reported that teen homelessness simply was not a problem in their communities. In order to more accurately describe the phenomenon experienced by teens, it is proposed that the term homelessness should be replaced with a more inclusive word, such as housing distress.     

Methodological issues in the social cost of gambling studies

The appropriate way to classify and measure the social costs of gambling is a very important, unresolved methodological issue that has been addressed by Collins and Lapsley (2000); Thompson, Gazel, and Rickman (1999); and Walker and Barnett (1999), among others. What should be included and excluded from social cost studies continues to be a controversial issue, as illustrated in the literature and recent conferences. This paper is an attempt to explain the economics conception of social costs in accessible language. By using a simple economic model and everyday examples, it shows that the economics methodology is better than the other methodologies currently available. There are four specific goals of the paper: (1) Discuss the importance of the social cost methodological debate and the state of research in the area; (2) Explain the Walker–Barnett definition of social cost in the context of a simple production possibilities frontier and indifference curve model; (3) Use simple illustrative examples to show why many of the alleged social costs should not be classified as such; and (4) Suggest a new method for analyzing the social costs and effects attributable to pathological gambling.     

Growing up fast: stress exposure and subjective "weathering" in emerging adulthood

We examine "subjective weathering" among females entering adulthood, using three waves of a national study. Subjective weathering is a social psychological component of aging that is associated with "physical weathering" previously observed in research on physical health. We examine the influence of stressors from childhood and adolescence on subjective weathering and depressive symptoms in emerging adulthood. Childhood abuse is associated with early menarche, as anticipated in research on physical weathering. Early menarche and child abuse are in turn associated with intimate partner violence exposure in adolescence. Both early menarche and intimate partner violence are associated with early parenthood and diminish the likelihood of high school graduation. These experiences culminate in subjective weathering associated with depressive symptoms in emerging adulthood. Our findings connect physical and subjective weathering within the stress process paradigm.     

A latent class analysis of resilient development among early adolescents living in public housing

The aim of this study was to identify types of early adolescents living in public housing neighborhoods based on patterns of resilient development. Informed by ecological-transactional theory, we evaluated a broad range of individual, relational, and contextual influences on resilient development among an ethnically diverse sample of 315 early adolescents (M_age = 12; 51% female) living in public housing neighborhoods. Results of a latent class analysis of 11 indicators and 2 outcome variables suggest three empirically derived classes representing overall patterns of favorable and unfavorable behavior. Daily hassles, low neighborhood cohesion, and a relaxed attitude towards substance use corresponded with a higher probability of substance use and delinquency. Significant differences in favorable behavior patterns reflecting resilient development between classes were found in attitudes towards substance use, academic efficacy, and school commitment. Results suggest important implications for preventive interventions for early adolescents living in public housing neighborhoods that are discussed.     

The knower and the known

In this paper, I address a dilemma in the theory of knowledge and argue that this dilemma can be overcome by invoking the work of two well known social scientists—Marx (here considered as a sociologist) and Piaget (a psychologist). The dilemma considered is that of the relationship between what are here called independent (i.e., non-circular) and relational definitions; each form of definition has been the basis of a particular approach to the knowable (the independent definition being the basis of empiricism and the relational definition being the basis of Hegelianism) and each of these approaches can be shown to be unsatisfactory: empiricism, brilliantly successful in practice, runs itself, at the theoretical level, into the circular and the relational; while Hegelianism, although impregnable in logic, gains such impregnability at the cost of any delimitation and, hence of precision and refutability. It is argued that Marx (a follower of Hegel) as adapted by Piaget, can indeed overcome these difficulties and so present us with a theory of knowledge that makes possible an approach that is both successful in practice and reputable in logic.     

Defining the Nonprofit Sector: Some Lessons from History

This article seeks to establish whether the structural-operational definition of the sector, used by the Johns Hopkins Comparative Nonprofit Sector Project (JHCNSP), is universal in its applicability. Historical case studies of primary health care and social housing provision in nineteenth-century England demonstrate that the definition cannot accommodate the institutional diversity of earlier periods and does not produce meaningful sectoral distinctions. The structural-operational definition rules out of the sector a significant proportion of nonstatutory, nonprofit maximizing providers. In particular, it excludes the mutual aid organizations, which are widely recognized as important for the development of civil society and which have historically been considered to be key components of the sector. These case studies suggest that the structural-operational definition limits the capacity of the JHCNSP to fulfil its aim of establishing the factors that promote or retard the sector's development owing to potential measurement errors and the pattern of development that the project implicitly assumes for the nonprofit sector.