Children’s Scales of Pleasure and Arousal

This article introduces the Children’s Scales of Pleasure and Arousal as instruments to enable children to provide judgments of emotions they witness or experience along the major dimensions of affect. In two studies (Study 1: N = 160, 3–11 years and adults; Study 2: N = 280, 3–5 years and adults), participants used the scales to indicate the levels of pleasure or arousal they perceived in stylized drawings of facial expressions, in photographs of facial expressions, or in emotion labels. All age groups used the Pleasure Scale reliably and accurately with all three types of stimuli. All used the Arousal Scale with stylized faces and with facial expressions, but only 5-year-olds did so for emotion labels.     

Shared Physical Custody and Children’s Experience of Stress

This article studies shared physical custody in Sweden, the country in the world where the phenomenon is most prevalent. We ask whether children in shared physical custody settings are more likely to report high levels of stress compared to children living in sole custody. The analysis is based on data with combined information from parents, children, and administrative registers. The models are controlled control for interparental as well as parent–child relationship quality and parents’ income. The results show that children sharing residence equally have lower likelihood of experiencing high levels of stress. The results can be interpreted as evidence for a positive effect of continuing everyday-like parental relationships after a family dissolution.     

Parents’ Beliefs about Emotions and Children’s Recognition of Parents’ Emotions

This study investigated parents’ emotion-related beliefs, experience, and expression, and children’s recognition of their parents’ emotions with 40 parent-child dyads. Parents reported beliefs about danger and guidance of children’s emotions. While viewing emotion-eliciting film clips, parents self-reported their emotional experience and masking of emotion. Children and observers rated videos of parents watching emotion-eliciting film clips. Fathers reported more masking than mothers and their emotional expressions were more difficult for both observers and children to recognize compared with mothers’ emotional expressions. For fathers, but not mothers, showing clearer expressions was related to children’s general skill at recognizing emotional expressions. Parents who believe emotions are dangerous reported greater masking of emotional expression. Contrary to hypothesis, when parents strongly believe in guiding their child’s emotion socialization, children showed less accurate recognition of their parents’ emotions.

Japanese Children’s Knowledge of the Facial Components of Basic Emotions

While numerous studies have investigated children’s recognition of facial emotional expressions, little evidence has been gathered concerning their explicit knowledge of the components included in such expressions. Thus, we investigated children’s knowledge of the facial components involved in the expressions of happiness, sadness, anger, and surprise. Four- and 5-year-old Japanese children were presented with the blank face of a young character, and asked to select facial components in order to depict the emotions he felt. Children’s overall performance in the task increased as a function of age, and was above chance level for each emotion in both age groups. Children were likely to select the Cheek raiser and Lip corner puller to depict happiness, the Inner brow raiser, Brow lowerer, and Lid droop to depict sadness, the Brow lowerer and Upper lid raiser to depict anger, and the Upper lid raiser and Jaw drop to depict surprise. Furthermore, older children demonstrated a better knowledge of the involvement of the Upper lid raiser in surprise expressions.     

A Qualitative Study of Parents’ and Children’s Views on Mediation

This qualitative study examined the benefits to children of family mediation for divorcing couples and the limitations of such mediation. To capture the perspectives of parents and their children, we invited 40 parents and 10 children to participate in the study. The parent informants reported that mediation improved the efficacy of their parenting and alleviated their children’s stress about their divorce. In contrast, the child informants felt they were powerless when involved in the mediation process and that they received limited support from the mediators. Strategies are proposed for improving the cultural applicability of mediation services for children in a Chinese society.     

Children’s Autonomy and Responsibility: An Analysis of Childrearing Advice

Employing qualitative content analysis of 300 childrearing advice articles from Parents magazine, this paper maps historical changes in the depiction of parental authority and children’s autonomy. This popular text reveals increased autonomy for children in their private self-expression, especially in regard to activities of daily living, personal appearance, and defiance of parents. However, the magazine also portrays children’s diminished public autonomy as revealed through increasingly restricted freedom of movement and substantially delayed acceptance of meaningful responsibilities. An appreciation of popular childrearing advice as a measure of individualistic cultural values thus requires an understanding of larger social changes that shift attention from public participation toward private self-expression.     

The Emotional Experience and Expression of Anger: Children’s Perspectives

The purpose of this study was to explore and identify key themes related to a child’s experience of anger. The existing literature on children’s emotional experiences stems from adult perceptions and interpretations; this study was envisioned to investigate the experience of anger among children using their own words. Furthermore, this study was designed to illustrate a contextual perspective of children’s emotional knowledge, so that teachers, social workers, counsellors and other child mental health professionals may be able to relate and interpret children’s emotional experiences. Participants were male and female students, aged 8–9 years and in a regular grade three classroom within a community school. Through the use of semi-structured interview focus groups conducted over a span of 10 weeks, participants were invited to disclose their understandings of anger and how they experienced it. Results were analyzed via a content analysis that resulted in five themes. These themes consisted of understanding anger, origins of anger, consequences of anger, regulation and resolution of anger, and finally relations with others. Results and implications of the findings were discussed.     

Exploring the Potential of Shadow Controls in the Evaluation of Children’s Services

This article describes and presents a framework for an under‐used evaluation technique in the context of an evaluation of a programme for disaffected young people. Shadow controls—the use of expert judgement to estimate the success of a programme—are often dismissed in research design as an unreliable form of comparison, but can be useful in situations where there is limited scope for a control group or to enhance the causal inference attributable to non‐experimental evaluations. The exercise described uses a practice tool as a structure for making predictions about the situations of the young people on the programme, assuming they do not receive an intervention. These predictions (shadow controls) are then compared to outcome data for the young people at the end of the programme. The results of the exercise provide some important messages about the programme’s effectiveness and the potential for strengthening non‐experimental evaluation methods. The article also discusses how the method can usefully inform evaluations of social programmes and encourage agency and user collaboration.     

Children’s Recognition and Discrimination of Fear and Disgust Facial Expressions

Facial expressions of fear and disgust have repeatedly been found to be less well recognized than those of other basic emotions by children. We undertook two studies in which we investigated the recognition and visual discrimination of these expressions in school-age children. In Study 1, children (5, 6, 9, and 10 years of age) were shown pairs of facial expressions, and asked to tell which one depicted a target emotion. The results indicated that accuracy in 9- and 10-year-olds was higher than in 5- and 6-year-olds for three contrasts: disgust–anger, fear–surprise, and fear–sadness. Younger children had more difficulty recognizing disgust when it was presented along with anger, and in recognizing fear when it was presented along with surprise. In Study 2, children (5, 6, 9, and 10 years of age) were shown a target expression along with two other expressions, and were asked to point to the expression that was the most similar to the target. Contrary to our expectations, even 5- and 6-year-olds were very accurate in discriminating fear and disgust from the other emotions, suggesting that visual perception was not the main limiting factor for the recognition of these emotions in school-age children.     

Foster Parents’ Nutritional Strategies and Children’s Well-Being

Among their many responsibilities, foster parents are tasked with providing healthy food and proper nutrition to children with a variety of physical, psychological, and emotional needs. Using the lens of symbolic interactionism, this exploratory mixed methods study examined how foster parents attend to the nutritional needs of abused and neglected children. Methods used included both quantitative surveys and qualitative follow-up interviews. Surveys were completed by 23 foster parents in a large, Midwest metropolitan area. Parents reported they provided their children balanced meals, although one-third of households reported instances of food insecurity. During qualitative interviews, foster parents (N = 9) described how children arrived at their home with a variety of unhealthy eating habits, some severe in nature. Parents discussed strategies used to modify and improve eating patterns, including offering healthy food choices, having children plan meals, and gathering as a family for daily dinners. In general, parents understood the link between unhealthy eating and past childhood trauma, but also reported being unprepared for more serious eating problems like hoarding. Findings indicate that foster parents need food assistance to increase food security as well as training in assessing and responding a variety of unhealthy child eating behaviors.     

Studying Another Culture through Children’s Games

Abstract

Laurel Holliday, ed. Children in the Holocaust and World War II: Their Secret Diaries. New York: Pocket Books, 409 pp. Hardback, $20.00. ISBN 0–671–52054–7. Paperback, $12.95. ISBN 0–671–52055–5. 1995. Reviewed by Samuel Totten.

Maita Floyd. Stolen Years, In My Little Corner of the World. Phoenix, Arizona: Eskualdun Publishers. $12.95. 1996. Reviewed by Carol Danks.

Julie Hamston and Kath Murdoch. Integrating Socially: Planning Integrated Units of Work for Social Education. Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 1996. 169 pages. Soft cover. ISBN 0–435–08899–8. Reviewed by John Douglas Hoge.     

The Effects of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program on Insurance Status and Health Care Utilization of Children

The State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) of 1997 aimed to increase public insurance eligibility to children in families that were above the Medicaid income cutoff line, but were too poor to afford private coverage. This paper shows that SCHIP helped as many as 1.3 million children leave the ranks of the uninsured. However, almost 400,000 of these children came from families with two privately insured parents, and added approximately $300 million in health care expenses to federal and state budgets. This paper also presents estimates of health care consumption of children who switched to public insurance as a result of SCHIP.     

Securing Children’s Best Interests While Resisting the Lure of Simple Solutions

The best-interest-of-the-child standard for child custody policy and decisions has benefits and hazards, the latter related to the exercise of judicial discretion in custody disputes. This article examines alternatives to the status quo, including the primary parent presumption, the approximation rule, shared parenting, an exact even split of custodial time, sole custody for couples labeled as in high conflict or those with young children, the friendly parent presumption, and decisions that defer to children’s stated preferences. Each alternative promises simpler paths to securing children’s welfare, but some have more support than others in the social science literature.     

Heterogeneous Effects of Child Development Accounts on Savings for Children’s Education

We examine effects of Child Development Accounts on savings for postsecondary education in a statewide experiment (N = 2,677), which automatically opened state-owned college savings accounts for treatment-group children, and encouraged their caregivers to open and save in participant-owned college savings accounts. The experiment achieves universal participation for children in the treatment group; almost all treatment-group children hold an account with more than $1,000 in college assets. Treatment participants we expect would hold their own participant-owned accounts without the intervention have $395 more in savings than their counterparts in the control group; those who are motivated by the intervention to hold a participant-owned account have mean deposits of $888. Those who are motivated by the intervention to save have mean deposits of $1,826. The intervention reduces the socioeconomic disparity in asset accumulation for children. The program has the potential to promote asset building for children’s education.     

Mid- and Late-Life Divorce and Parents’ Perceptions of Emerging Adult Children’s Emotional Reactions

A paucity of research exists pertaining to the experiences of emerging adult children in the context of parental divorce. This study uses Paul R. Amato’s divorce-stress-adjustment framework to organize a set of predictors that potentially influence parents’ perceptions of their emerging adult children’s emotional reactions to a divorce. Data come from a nationally representative AARP study, from which we analyzed a sample of 283 parents who experienced a divorce at age 40 years or older. Results indicate that parental gender, nature of contact with the ex-partner, divorce timing, time spent contemplating divorce, a history of parental divorce, and the reason for divorce influence parents’ perceptions of their emerging adult children’s reaction to the divorce. Implications, limitations, and future direction for research are discussed.     

Children’s Mental Health Providers’ Perceptions of Mental Health Literacy Among Parents and Caregivers

Mental health disorders are prevalent among children, yet many do not receive treatment. Parents and caregivers play a vital role in recognizing mental health disorders in children and accessing treatment. But a substantial number of parents lack essential knowledge of children’s mental health disorders, including risk factors, symptom recognition, and treatment options. Little focus has been given to parents in the children’s mental health literacy literature. The purpose of this article is to begin filling that gap by using a survey to describe the perceptions of child and family mental health providers’ perceptions regarding the amount, accuracy, and origin of mental health literacy in the parents of the children they treat. The impact of those perceptions on the work of providers is also explored. Eighty-seven mental health providers completed a survey to assess their perceptions of parent mental health literacy in the area of children’s mental health. Providers perceived parent mental health literacy as low, inaccurate, and inconsistent. In addition, providers indicated that parents rely on informal sources of support, such as friends and family for information about children’s mental health. Implications for social work researchers, practitioners, and the children and families they serve are discussed.     

Saving for Children’s College Education: An Empirical Analysis of the Trade-off Between the Quality and Quantity of Children

This paper examines the effect of children’s college expenses on household savings. The theoretical model introduces life-cycle savings into the quality–quantity model of fertility and derives predictions for the impact of expected expenses on parents’ savings. Using the actual amount of parents’ financial support reported in the Survey of Consumer Finances, the empirical model estimates the expected expenditures on children’s college education and investigates the effect of expected expenditures on parents’ savings. The results show that parents’ support for each of their children’s college expenses decreases with the number of children. The results are consistent with the predictions of the life-cycle theory of saving and consumption that households save in advance for expected expenses to smooth their consumption.

Parental Borrowing for Dependent Children’s Higher Education

Using the 1992–1993 Baccalaureate and Beyond Longitudinal Study, with the 1997 follow-up, the parental decision to borrow and, for borrowers, the level of borrowing for dependent children’s college education was analyzed. Parents with smaller household size and those being college graduates borrowed greater amounts. White parents borrowed greater amounts than their non-White counterparts. The age of the student, dependent students’ income and parents’ cash and savings each had a significant negative impact on the amount parents borrowed, while home equity was a significant positive factor. Greater college costs significantly increased parents’ decision to borrow, as well as the borrowed amount. Greater amounts of grants significantly reduced the amount borrowed.