How early is early intervention and who should get it? Contested meanings in determining thresholds for intervention

The latest wave of reforms of the child protection system in Australia have been based on attempts to provide support to all families with vulnerable children, rather than increasing surveillance of ‘at risk’ families and forensic responses to incidents of maltreatment. This includes a drive to widen the remit of child protection from the statutory child protection agency and involve other government agencies such as health and education as well as the non-government sector in child protection. This paper reports on the effects of one such reform, the NSW initiative Keep Them Safe. It focuses on the classification of families as needing either early intervention or intensive support, using thematic analysis of qualitative interview data.MethodInterviews and focus groups were conducted with practitioners and managers from human service agencies (total n = 115), and discussed their perceptions of the initiative and the changes it had introduced to service delivery.FindingsPractitioners discussed family needs in ways which contested the policy meanings of ‘early intervention’: whether families are conceptualised in terms of their needs or risk; whether engagement with services should be voluntary or mandated; and whether the agencies to support them should be the statutory agency or an NGO. The implications for these tensions, in terms of policy and practice, are discussed.     

A different life?: Barthes,Foucault and everyday life

How might the injunction to ‘think differently’ in the work of French theorists Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault have informed a re-thinking of everyday life? In Barthes’ work, a critical analysis of myth and ideology in the contemporary everyday life of the late 1950s gives way to counter-ideological strategies that might seem to move away from the everyday and towards the utopian. However, the utopian imagination at work in Barthes’ thought is effective precisely in its insistence on the everyday detail. This is reflected in the later work in the attention given to the incident and the haiku. In his later work, Foucault turns towards antiquity in response to his own assessment of the ubiquitous diffusion of relations of power and the need to ‘think differently’. It is, however, in the interviews and specifically in a series of comments on homosexuality that Foucault is most attentive to the ‘possibilities for new life’ in his own time. It is through the undoing of already established relations and the experimentation with different modes of relation that a locus of difference can be found in everyday life. This is characterized by Foucault as a heterotopia. Foucault’s tentative suggestions of different possibilities are oriented towards an intensification of pleasures, counter to the psychoanalytic attention to desire. However, Foucault’s account of pleasure is associated with mortality, suggesting the question: is this different life one destined only to posterity and its own transcendence? Deleuze’s reading of Foucauldian subjectivation suggests a different strategy of resistance, more attuned to the immanence of a life.     

Realising children's agency in research: Partners and participants?

This paper seeks to contribute to debates within the 'new' sociology of childhood by focusing on issues of structure and agency in the research process. Drawing on a detailed qualitative study of children's paid work and employment, funded as part of the ESRC 'Children 5-16: growing into the 21st Century' initiative, the discussion examines the extent to which it is possible to design and conduct research on and for children, where children are participants in the research process. The paper suggests that despite the best intentions of researchers, the structure and organization of research inevitably reduces children to the status of at best, participants rather than partners and at worst objects of the researchers gaze. The reasons for this relate to issues of methodology rather than method in that what counts as acceptable academic knowledge is defined in relatively narrow and conservative terms by academics who are invariably adults and to children's lack of research or academic capital.     

Balance sheets of early boomers: are they different from pre-boomers?

Nationally representative data are used to compare the magnitude, composition, and distribution of accumulated wealth of early boomers (born between 1946 and 1957) and pre-boomers (born between 1934 and 1945) at the same life cycle stage (ages 44–45, occurring in 1989 for pre-boomers and in 2001 for early boomers). Early boomers have accumulated greater mean wealth than pre-boomers at the same age, however median wealth did not change and net worth among lower-middle wealth groups declined. Multivariate analysis identified demographic change among those in the wealth distribution tails that indicates the increasing importance of education and race as predictors of wealth.

Is the subaltern resilient? Notes on agency and neoliberal subjects

ABSTRACT

This essay engages the question of where Gayatri Spivak’s understanding of subalternity is to be located today, and it does so by first establishing a brief genealogy of thinking the outside of modern, capitalist economic and cultural modes of production. This genealogy reaches back to the classic Marxist figure of the lumpenproletariat, moves through its postcolonial reappropriation by Fanon as well as Gramsci’s original articulation of the subaltern, and arrives at Subaltern Studies’ re-articulation of Gramsci’s notion of the subaltern as well as Spivak’s critical dialogue with Subaltern Studies. This first part of the essay lays the ground for an argument that pertains to the relation between subalternity, agency, resistance, and resilience, within a context of neoliberalism in which agency is particularly salient as a way of accounting for the world. The discussion on subalternity and agency builds on Spivak’s critical engagement with the task of ‘giving voice’, as well as on Saba Mahmood’s work on the conceptual entanglement of agency and resistance. This leads me to the central argument that we may be witnessing a shift in the conceptualization of agency, which is particularly salient to a contemporary understanding of subalternity and the shift that the ‘new subaltern’ [Spivak, G., 2012. The new subaltern: a silent interview. In: V. Chaturvedi, ed. Mapping subaltern studies and the postcolonial. London: Verso] indicates: in current neoliberal times, it is perhaps less agency-as-resistance that informs an understanding of the subaltern’s agency, but rather agency-as-resilience. The essay concludes with a critique of resilience.     

Do Stepparents Experience More Parental Antagonism Than Biological Parents? A Test of Evolutionary and Socialization Perspectives

Research regarding the affective experiences of stepparents is sparse. This study investigated the relationship between parental type (step or biological) and parental socioemotional investment, resentment, and jealousy. The study explored whether evolutionary or socialization accounts of parenting were able to explain the differential treatment of step and biological children. The pattern of findings—that stepparents generally exhibit lower parental socioemotional investment and higher parental resentment and parental jealousy than biological parents—suggests that stepparental antagonism might be due to differences in innate motivations of step and biological parents. Implications for research, theory, and practice are discussed.     

Multisystemic Therapy for Child Abuse and Neglect: Do Parents Show Improvement in Parental Mental Health Problems and Parental Stress?

Multisystemic Therapy for Child Abuse and Neglect (MST-CAN) is an evidence-based program for families with children who experience maltreatment. This clinical trial is the first evaluation of MST-CAN in a German-speaking area. Parental psychological problems and parental stress have been shown to be risk factors for child abuse and neglect. By the end of treatment, parents reported significantly less psychological distress than before the start of MST-CAN. Six months after treatment, this reduction was still evident. However, parents did not report any significant reduction of parental stress at any of the three time points. MST-CAN is an effective intervention for child maltreatment that not only combats child abuse and neglect but also has the potential to alleviate parental psychological distress.     

A review of enabling factors in support intervention programmes for early school leavers: What are the implications for Sub-Saharan Africa?

One of the major problems facing education systems in Sub-Saharan Africa is the phenomenon of young people who leave school before completion. Research has shown that this phenomenon disadvantages young people and exposes them to various forms of social exclusion. Accordingly, there have been increasing calls for the scaling up of support intervention programmes for young people who leave school early. This paper analyses literature on support intervention programmes for early school leavers (ESLs) to identify enabling factors that can be promoted in future or in current less effective interventions. The review revealed that programmes that address the multiple disadvantages and needs of young people through flexible, holistic and intensive support approaches tend to be more attractive and beneficial to the participants. The findings from this review are crucial to policy makers and teachers working in support intervention programmes for ESLs.     

How Are Parental Psychological Control and Autonomy‐Support Related? A Cluster‐Analytic Approach

This study addresses the hypothesis that the relationship between parental psychological control and autonomy‐support depends on how autonomy‐support is conceptualized, that is, in terms of promotion of independence or in terms of promotion of volitional functioning. Questionnaires tapping into psychological control and these two types of autonomy‐support were administered to a sample of 495 emerging adults. Cluster analysis revealed that, whereas parental promotion of independence may or may not co‐occur with psychological control, high parental promotion of volitional functioning systematically goes together with low psychological control and vice versa. Differences between clusters in terms of adjustment were mainly driven by differences in psychological control and promotion of volitional functioning and to a lesser extent by differences in promotion of independence.     

A shift in Western development agency thinking? The case for second best

This review essay illustrates a turn in Western development agency thinking in two recent publications intended for development agencies and African “reformers,” by authors with long careers in Western development institutions. Both publications explicitly reject – at least for the short to medium term – a comprehensive “good governance” approach to development. Subsequently, a publication entitled Violence and Social Orders, authored by three American scholars with an interest in the role of institutions in historical change, is reviewed since it is a crucial influence in the consolidation of this turn in thinking. This new Western approach is more restrained in its ambition to introduce new governance institutions in the developing world. This implies that it is prepared to tolerate what it considers to be imperfections in both the state and the market, viewing these as a second best result (in the short to medium term) in exchange for greater chances of realising positive development outcomes over the long term.     

What's so different about differential response? A multilevel and longitudinal analysis of child neglect investigations

Differential response (DR) is a system reform that allows child protective services (CPS) agencies to divert low-to-moderate risk families from an investigative track to an alternate track that does not require a maltreatment disposition or identification of an alleged perpetrator. Knowledge of how DR alters the flow of cases through CPS systems has been restricted by methodological limitations in prior research. This study uses cross-sectional and longitudinal data from the National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System (NCANDS) child file to examine the extent to which DR implementation affects the number and demographic composition of cases investigated for neglect. Results from multivariate, multilevel cross-sectional analysis of 2010 data indicated that investigations were 2.4 times more likely to be substantiated in DR counties than in non-DR counties. Children with a previous substantiated report were also more likely to have a current report substantiated and this difference was significantly greater in DR counties than in non-DR counties. Child race and ethnicity did not predict substantiation decisions. Results from a mixed-effect longitudinal analysis of 997,512 cases from 269 counties between 2001 and 2010 suggest that the rate of investigations fell sharply nationwide within three years of DR implementation. However, substantiation rates did not change as a result of DR implementation. Instead, analysis indicated differences between DR and non-DR counties emerged before the launch of DR. The findings highlight the benefit of using “big data” and longitudinal analysis to assess large-scale policy changes.     

Is Parental Alienation Disorder a Valid Concept? Not According to Scientific Evidence. A Review of Parental Alienation,DSM-5 and ICD-11 by William Bernet

This article reviews a recent book arguing how a concept known as parental alienation syndrome—now parental alienation disorder—should be included in official psychiatric/psychological and medical classification diagnostic manuals. Anecdotal cases and opinion are presented as research and scientific evidence, and stories are presented as research studies. In addition, the book often contradicts itself in different sections. The author is not familiar with scientific methodology, confuses various statistical and research procedures and terminology, and thus misleads the reader in trying to promote this theory. This book's claim that it is the most comprehensive compilation of the evidence supporting parental alienation disorder/parental alienation syndrome is false, and it is not recommended by the reviewers.     

Parental visiting and family reunification: could inclusive practice make a difference?

This study examines whether inclusive practice, or parental involvement in foster children's lives while in placement, is correlated with more frequent visiting and a greater likelihood of reunification. This hypothesis was tested among a random sample of 230 twelve- and thirteen-year-olds placed in traditional family foster care. Results suggest that mothers who visit their child and are involved in case reviews and child care activities visit more frequently than mothers who visit in settings such as agency offices and have no other types of involvement. In addition, visiting frequency is highly predictive of reunification. These associations were not explained by maternal substance abuse, mental illness, or the child's placement history.     

Compliance costs caused by agency action? Empirical evidence and implications for tax compliance

Compliance costs of taxpayers should not only be affected by the tax law itself but also by its implementation through the tax authorities. In this paper we analyze the effect of authority behavior on the burden of complying with tax regulations. Using survey data of Belgian businesses, we develop an estimation strategy to overcome simultaneity bias by the construction of proxy variables. According to our estimate, a customer-unfriendly tax administration increases the average compliance burden by about 27%. Our outcome has interesting implications for further research. First of all, authority behavior does not only affect “soft” tax compliance factors like fairness and trust, but also “hard” aspects like costs. Second, the distribution of administrative cost burdens between the taxpayer side and the authorities may be important regarding the cost-efficiency of the tax system as a whole.     

Does Educational Similarity Drive Parental Support?

This article tests competing mechanisms explaining linkages between parent–child educational similarity and parental advice and interest to adult children, asking whether mechanisms differ for mothers and fathers. Educational similarities might provide common ground whereas educational dissimilarity affects parents' authority to dispense advice. Using ordered logistic regression with data from the Netherlands Kinship Panel Study (N = 2,444) parental advice and interest are modeled separately for mothers and fathers. Seemingly unrelated estimation is used to test for gender differences across models, revealing that mechanisms driving parental support differ by parents' gender. Fathers show more interest in adult children when they are educationally similar (consistent with the homophily hypothesis), but only among the highly educated, whereas mothers show more interest to highly educated children, regardless of their own level of educational attainment. Fathers' advice is conditioned on their own educational attainment whereas mothers give advice unconditionally (consistent with the gender hypothesis).     

Does Family Intervention for Adolescent Substance Use Impact Parental Wellbeing? A Longitudinal Evaluation

Adolescent substance abuse is a common problem and family interventions are emerging as a strategy to prevent it and assist family coping. The effectiveness of a prevention‐focussed family intervention was evaluated for its secondary impacts on improving parental mental health and family functioning. Twenty‐four secondary schools in Melbourne Victoria were randomly assigned to either a control condition or an intervention titled Resilient Families. The two intervention levels analysed were: (1) a parenting booklet only and; (2) combining the booklet with face‐to‐face parent education sessions. Parent surveys at baseline were followed up one year and four years later. Repeated‐measures analysis (n = 560) found parents attending parent education demonstrated reductions in mental health symptoms, however this had negative effects on family cohesion and no impact on family conflict. These findings were interpreted in terms of parent education assisting parent mental health by promoting assertive parenting styles that may increase adolescent‐parent tension by encouraging firmer parental boundaries and strategies to reduce adolescent substance use.     

Parental Divorce and College Students’ Persistence and Degree Attainment

The purpose of this study is to analyze whether college students from divorced families are more or less likely than their peers to persist and graduate in 4, 5, or 6 years. Utilizing data from the 2007 Cooperative Institutional Research Program survey of first-year students, the results of multinomial logistic regression analyses suggest that students whose parents were divorced were significantly less likely to graduate in 4, 5, or 6 years. These findings held controlling for demographic variables, precollege academic indicators, college experiences, and academic motivation.     

Are They Listening? Parental Social Coaching and Parenting Emotional Climate Predict Adolescent Receptivity

Associations linking parenting emotional climate and quality of parental social coaching with young adolescents' receptivity to parental social coaching were examined (N = 80). Parenting emotional climate was assessed with adolescent‐reported parental warmth and hostility. Quality of parental social coaching (i.e., prosocial advice, benign framing) was assessed via parent‐report and behavioral observations during a parent–adolescent discussion about negative peer evaluation. An adolescent receptivity latent variable score was derived from observations of adolescents’ behavior during the discussion, change in adolescents’ peer response plan following the discussion, and adolescent‐reported tendency to seek social advice from the parent. Parenting climate moderated associations between coaching and receptivity: Higher quality coaching was associated with greater receptivity in the context of a more positive climate. Analyses suggested a stronger association between coaching and receptivity among younger compared to older adolescents.