Individual Differences in Children's Understanding of the School

Following previous research (Buchanan-Barrow and Barrett, 1996) which investigated the developmental trends in children's understanding of the school, this paper reports a study which explored wider influences on children's thinking in an examination of individual differences within those broad trends. First, the role of socio-economic class, gender and birth-order were examined for possible relationship to the children's understanding. Second, the attitudes of children, parents and teachers towards their school were investigated in order to assess possible links with the children's thinking. Children, aged 5-11, from two primary schools, were interviewed, with separate questionnaires being completed by their parents and teachers. Although the findings suggested developmental trends associated with age, there were also clear indications of other patterns associated with all the social categories examined in this study. Furthermore, there was evidence of context-effects, with links between the children's attitudes and their understanding of the school and also between parental and children's attitudes. Given the extent and significance of the factors which emerged, children's social understanding would appear to be complex and liable to vary according to their social group memberships.     

The importance of schools and teachers in child welfare

The article begins by challenging what is considered to be the relative neglect by child and family social work of the importance for children of school and teachers. Key roles of school in children's lives are conceptualized. School is argued to have potential as an ally for children, a guarantor of basic protection, a capacity builder, a secure base from which to explore the self and the world, an integrator into community and culture, a gateway to adult opportunities and a resource for parents and communities. It is suggested that school can have a special supportive value for children experiencing adversity, including those in state care or under supervision, those whose parents have divorced, and those recovering from abuse or neglect. The implications of the central importance of schools and teachers for child and family social work are discussed with reference to the child as client, work with teachers, work with the wider school and community, and policies in social work agencies and in education and training programmes for social workers and teachers.     

Towards Establishing School Social Work in Malaysia

This paper calls for the introduction of school social work in Malaysia. Many industrialized countries have introduced school social work, partly because teachers are not able to tackle students' personal and social problems. Teachers are burdened with teaching tasks and are not trained to handle social problems. The introduction of school social work in these developed countries was an admission that there was only so much teachers could do in addressing the problems of school children. Even with school counselors, the problems have not decreased. Many parents in Malaysia perceive schools to be incapable of providing sufficient education to excel in the major exams. The existence of many private tuition institutions and private teachers is a testimony to that perception. If society has already deemed these teachers to be incapable of providing quality education, to expect them to look after students' social problems is presumptuous on society's part. The need for school personnel who understand the social ills of the community is urgently needed, and it is the contention of this paper that school social workers are best equipped for that responsibility.     

Psychosocial treatment and relations between children in residential boarding schools and their parents

The present study examined the impact of psychosocial treatment for children in residential boarding schools on relations with their parents and family, and on the extent of the children's satisfaction with the boarding school. Fifty-one boarding schools (91% of the boarding institutions in Israel) participated in the longitudinal study. The sample consisted of 418 respondents, including boarding school directors, social workers, psychologists, programme directors, counsellors, therapists, and house mothers. The findings reveal that the children maintained a moderate level of contact with their parents and families. The children's overall level of satisfaction with the boarding school was found to be moderate, and increased to the extent that they received more hours of psychosocial and therapeutic care.     

Supporting Talented Youth

The study explores the main methods that are used to identify gifted students at both foreign and Russian schools: academic competitions, earned grades, the administration of special tests, and teacher opinions about the individual academic performance of their students. The authors note that none of the criteria are universally used insofar as it is impossible to provide a perfect formal measure of student talent that can identify students who think outside the box and have unique skills but who do poorly on standardized tests during the educational process. It is argued that to more effectively identify talented youth, we should use all of the methods taken as a whole without preferring any single approach to another one. The article also analyzes the main tools that are used to support talented students: scholarships and grants, preferential admission at universities, enrollment at special schools for gifted children and K–11 schools associated with universities, special classes, extracurricular studies and summer schools, and special centers for gifted children. Particular attention is paid to how special educational programs and methods for working with gifted children should be implemented at schools and to how teachers should work with parents and teacher assistants. The article provides a retrospective analysis of the measures that the Government of the Russian Federation has used since 1999 to identify and support gifted students. The authors conclude that the current laws that regulate this area are fairly contradictory. They frequently fail to specify the mechanisms that should be used to implement the provisions of the program documents.     

Disparities in the Quality of Pediatric Dental Care: New Research and Needed Changes

In the United States, there are significant disparities in the oral health of children from families with high and low socioeconomic status and between majority and minority children. Extant research on these health differences has focused predominately on caregiver knowledge, beliefs, and practices as well as structural barriers such as Medicaid coverage, dentist availability, and transportation issues. Little attention has been paid to the quality of care families experience when taking their child to the dentist or the ways in which dental schools train their students to work with young children. This policy report describes some of the experiences of low-income and ethnically diverse young children and their parents in dental clinics and highlights some of the weaknesses of dental training. We contend that increasing the standards for dental training and practice are necessary for improving young children's oral health and reducing these disparities.     

Relational and Individual Resources as Predictors of Empathy in Early Childhood

The goal of this study was to examine children's cognitive and language development and social engagement of mother as mediators of the relationship between maternal emotional availability at 15 months and children's empathy at the ages of two and four. Participants were 661 low-income, ethnically diverse mother-child dyads participating in a trial of home visitation in the Denver area. Using home- and lab-based free-play episodes, mothers' emotional availability (15 months) and children's social engagement of mother (21 and 24 months) were assessed. Standardized measures were used to assess children's language development (21 months) and cognitive development (24 months). Empathy was assessed using a simulated injury paradigm at ages two (both 21 and 24 months) and four. The predictive models supported the hypothesis that the child's cognitive and social resources mediate the relationship between maternal emotional availability and children's empathy with respect to empathy at the age of two toward both mothers and an unfamiliar examiner. These results indicate that parental sensitive behavior is not the only important condition for predicting children's empathy, and that children's own internalized resources are a likely mechanism of transmission from parents caring for their children to children learning to care for others.     

Reaching Inner-City Children

One of the obstacles faced by community social service agencies is difficulty in attracting adolescents to the services offered them. Adoldscents typically do not walk in or keep appointments at outpatient clinics and can be difficult to engage even for outreach programs. One solution to this dilemma is to go where the children are: the public schools. One of the biggest problems in the Boston public school system is that many students and their families have pressing social, emotional, and physical needs that are not being met outside the school and that adversely affect their education. The schools are educational institutions, not human service agencies, and they are ill prepared to deal with many of the problems and needs of their students' lives. In 1984, an independent board composed of representatives from the Boston Public Schools, state, city, and private social service agencies, parents and students, secured funding and formed the Boston Student Human Services Collaborative. The mission of the Collaborative was to supplement and expand support services to the schools. The hope was that such services would free up both children and teachers to invest in each other, thereby increasing learning. This paper describes the group work component of a Collaborative program at an inner-city school. After a brief look at the inner-city context, the group work program model is presented as a case study, including specific types of groups that have worked well and details of recruitment, composition, goals, activities, and leadership roles. Following this is a discussion of race, color, and ethnicity, and then a list of guiding principles for working with middle school adolescents in groups.     

Saving-investment correlations and capital mobility: The experience of developing countries

This paper estimates saving and investment correlations for 58 developing countries in order to assess the degree of capital mobility in the Feldstein-Horioka sense for these countries. Using a new estimation technique, fully modified ordinary least squares, that simultaneously corrects for serial correlation, endogeneity, and sample bias (asymptotically), the study finds that many developing countries are financially integrated in the long run. Moreover, the estimation results do show that saving-investment correlations for middle-income countries tend to be lower than those for low-income countries.     

The impact of poverty and immigrant background on children's school satisfaction: evidence from Norway

Children's school enjoyment and satisfaction with their teachers is crucial to their quality of life. Still, we have little knowledge about what shapes positive outcomes in this respect, and to what extent groups of children and youth differ from each other. This article compares immigrant children with Norwegian children from low-income families and with a reference group of children from normal-income families. The children were interviewed at age 10–12 years, and again at age 13–15 years; thus, we can follow changes over time. Immigrant children from income-poor families express significantly higher school and teacher satisfaction than any other category of 10–12-year-olds. However, for the 13–15-year-olds, there are no systematic differences between group averages, but there are more signs of polarisation among low-income immigrant children. Explanations for these patterns are sought in the literature on social capital in immigrant families.     

"They don't want to hear us": Hispanic elders and adult children speak about end-of-life planning

This study used focus groups to understand Hispanic elders' and adult children's concerns about end-of-life planning. Ten older persons participated in the elders group, and ten adult children in a separate group. Themes in both groups included communication, control, burden, spirituality, religious issues, and importance of family relationships. Communication regarding end-of-life planning was of particular importance to both elders and adult children. The most striking indication of the challenges in communication about end-of-life issues is the insistence by both the elders and the adult children that their children/ parents do not want to have these discussions.     

Emotion Regulation in Low-income Preschoolers

The present study was concerned with identifying the causes of low-income preschoolers' negative emotions and their most common regulation responses. The relations of family socialization practices and temperament to the children's emotion regulation skills were also examined. Ninety predominantly minority low-income preschoolers (46 boys) and their mothers participated. During visits to the children's preschools, observers watched for expressions of anger and sadness, and recorded the causes of the displays and the children's reactions. Mothers reported on their emotion socialization and discipline practices and their children's temperament. Although the children expressed more anger than sadness, they used more constructive reactions in response to sadness and more non-constructive reactions in response to anger. Maternal reports of appropriate family emotion were associated with low levels of non-constructive regulation responses to anger and sadness whereas reports of inconsistent parental discipline were generally associated with non-constructive regulation responses. All in all, the findings of this study are in accord with findings on middle-income children and indicate that low- and middle-income children are more alike than different with regard to the regulation of negative emotion in the peer environment.     

Parent-Teacher Cooperation

Cooperation between teachers and parents is a sine qua non of any properly functioning educational system. This article shows Soviet teachers what they must do to have parents reinforce the influence of the school. It appeared in an elementary school journal published by the RSFSR Ministry of Education ("Basic Features of Work with Parents of 1st to 4th Grade Pupils," Nachal'naia Shkola, 1960, No. 3.)     

Ethnic Differences in the Effects of Parental Depression on Preschool Children's Socioemotional Functioning

The present study describes the depressive symptomatology of 393 parents of prekindergarten children and assesses ethnic differences in the depression scores of these parents and their differential consequences for children's social competence. Data are drawn from the National Center for Early Development and Learning (NCEDL) classroom study, a national, longitudinal study examining the quality and outcomes of prekindergarten programs operated in schools or under the direction of state and local educational agencies, and the supplemental NCEDL familial and social environments study. Analyses indicated that Latino parents were more likely than African‐American and White parents to be depressed. However, as reported by both parents and teachers, behavioral outcomes for African‐American children of parents with elevated depressive symptomatology were worse than children of their Latino and White counterparts. Interactions between ethnicity and depressive symptomatology emerged in the parent‐child relationship, with African‐American parents with elevated depressive symptoms reporting significantly greater levels of conflict in the parent–child relationship than their non‐depressed counterparts. African‐American parents with elevated depression scores were also less likely to be in marital relationships than their non‐depressed counterparts. Among African‐American families, parent–child conflict served as a mediator of the effects of parental depression on child outcomes. Implications for intervention are discussed.     

扶上马再送一程:父母的帮助及其对子女赡养行为的影响

以往关于中国家庭代际关系的研究往往侧重于分析子女对父母的赡养,而很少讨论父母对成年子女的帮助,以及这种帮助对传统赡养关系的影响。本文在分析“中国老年社会追踪调查”在2012年的试调查数据后发现,现在中国父母正在从经济和小孩照料等方面向他们的成年子女提供各种形式的帮助,而且父母的帮助（特别是小孩照料）对是否能够得到子女赡养和赡养的水平均有显著影响。分城乡的比较研究发现,父母的帮助对子女赡养行为的影响在城市表现得更加明显,这在一定程度上说明,随着社会现代化程度的提高,中国家庭养老赖以维持的基础已经发生了改变。     

Does Parental Participation in Schools Empower or Strain Civil Society? The Case of Community‐managed Schools in Central America

Among the various educational models in Latin America that seek to increase parental participation in schooling, perhaps the most far‐reaching is the experiment with self‐managed schools. These are publicly funded schools administered by parents. Broad public powers, such as the capacity to decide the budget and make staffing decisions, are given to parents, many of whom have had very limited prior administrative experience. How does this policy innovation impact on civil society? Does parental participation in school administration empower participating citizens or strain civil society? There are various ways of answering these questions. This article looks at some possible ways to conceptualize and assess the relationship between parental participation in self‐managed schools and civil society. The article draws from the experience of El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua, where these reforms have advanced significantly since the 1990s.     

Civic Socialization in Public and Fundamentalist Schools*

Objective. Critics of schools governed by fundamentalist religions are concerned that these schools will not socialize students to the attitudes and values appropriate for citizens of a pluralistic liberal democracy. Among these values are support for democratic norms, political tolerance, moral reasoning and autonomy, duty to community, and acceptance of nontraditional lifestyles. This article examines the empirical basis for the critics' concerns. Methods. Using difference‐of‐means tests and multivariate regression, we compare students in the 10th and 12th grades attending regular public and fundamentalist Christian schools. Results. The 10th‐grade comparisons of the two sets of students confirm many of the expectations of critics of fundamentalist schools. By the 12th grade, however, the students in fundamentalist schools have surpassed students in regular public schools on many of the desired attitudes and values, but the fundamentalist school students remain less accepting of nontraditional lifestyles. Conclusion. For the most part, fundamentalist Christian high schools do as well or better than regular public schools in socializing their students to the values appropriate to citizenship in liberal democracies.     

EXPOSING ADOPTION MYTHS: ACCESS TO INFORMATION ABOUT ORIGINS IN VICTORIA

Victoria was the first State to allow adopted persons unqualified access to their original identity and to provide natural parents and others with conditional access to identifying information. This article examines findings from 1985 to 1988 to examine four assumptions. These are that: few adoptees would want to know about or meet their natural parents and so few would register with the Adoption Information Service; few adoptees would welcome an approach from or on behalf of their natural parents and most would reject such an approach; few relinquishing parents would wish to meet or know about their relinquished child and consequently most would reject an approach by or on behalf of their child; and adoptive parents would not wish to acknowledge the adoptive status of their children by providing information to the natural parent facilitating a meeting between the natural parent and the child. The data suggest that the above assumptions do not reflect the experience or behaviour of adopted persons, natural parents or adoptive parents.     

Bangladeshi families living in hardship: findings from research using a life-history approach

Whilst there are many commonalities in the experience of living in hardship, there are also many ways in which the experience of poverty varies. This paper draws on findings from life-history interviews about parenting and children's well-being which were undertaken with 70 low-income households including nine Bangladeshi families living in London. The paper explores the ways in which the experience of Bangladeshi families was similar to and different from the sample as a whole, discusses the intersection of culture, class, gender and ethnicity in the experience of living in poverty and how this impacted on parents' ability to access support. The findings show the many and complex ways poverty impacts on families' lives and suggest that many of the barriers for Bangladeshi families' to accessing services that have previously been identified still exist. The findings highlight the importance of social workers having the space to reflect on and develop their own practice in order to avoid oversimplistic assumptions about the experiences of Bangladeshi families and the need for home-visiting services so practitioners can develop relationships and build the confidence of the most socially excluded parents.     

Socio-legal protection of minorities -- a study of Indian educational cases

Many Muslim families do not enroll their children in school. This is so because material in school syllabi sometimes goes against Islamic beliefs or adversely affects the Muslim self-image, orthodox parents will not send their daughters to coeducational academic institutions, some adults do not realize the benefits of education with regard to the welfare of their children, and many Muslim localities remain resource-deficient slums. The government, local authorities, and Muslims should band together to encourage and enable backward Muslim minorities to uplift themselves academically. Steps to that end could include adding minority representation to the bodies which approve the syllabi in order to monitor the potential inclusion of offensive material, continuing to upgrade teachers in Muslim schools, optimizing available space in Muslim educational institutions, empowering minorities commissions in states to help backward minorities to garner education, eliminating the rules of discretion to avoid corruption and nepotism, simplifying the rules and procedures governing grants to educational institutions, conducting a scientific survey to obtain accurate baseline information for use in planning the education of Muslim minorities, giving special preference to localities populated predominantly with minorities when establishing educational institutions, and providing scholarship to bright and needy minority students. Additionally, the National Minorities Commission should be empowered by the central government to collect information and report on the educational, social, and economic conditions of minorities across the country. Autonomy in management must also be respected, with regulatory measures applicable to minority institutions being reasonable and appropriate.