Mother Bear: A Relational Approach to Child Therapy

This paper explores the role and importance of the relationship in the treatment of a young foster child. Because of parental neglect and loss, the child related in an inauthentic manner in order to engage her parents. Her manner of relating arose from old patterns, which were defensive adaptations to traumatic situations. The authors employ a relational theory of the self to conceptualize the processes from an intrapsychic and interpersonal perspective. The paper emphasizes that all the interactions between child and therapist, both in and out of the traditional therapy office, converged into a multidimensional authentic relationship. The authors define this relationship experience as the life space and believe that the establishment of the life space contributed to progress in the therapy.     

Letter From the Editors

ABSTRACT

In this article we explore older persons’ definitions of and explanations for elder abuse in the Netherlands by means of interviews with older persons. A qualitative study was conducted based on semistructured interviews with 35 older persons who had no experience with abuse. Our findings show that older persons participating in our study define elder abuse foremost as physical violence that is performed intentionally. The study participants explain elder abuse as a result of the dependency and vulnerability of older persons, of changing norms and values, and of changes in the position of older persons in society, which result in disrespect toward older persons and a lack of social control and responsibility. The older persons’ explanations for the occurrence of abuse mainly focus on societal changes; older persons seem to regard elder abuse primarily as a societal problem. This understanding of, and explanation for, elder abuse may influence their detection and reporting behavior, as they may tend to acknowledge only severe cases of intentional physical violence that leave clear and therefore physically detectable evidence.     

Mother and Child Facial Expression Labeling Skill Relates to Mutual Responsiveness During Emotional Conversations

The capacity to engage with one’s child in a reciprocally responsive way is an important element of successful and rewarding parent–child conversations, which are common contexts for emotion socialization. The degree to which a parent–child dyad shows a mutually responsive orientation presumably depends on both individuals’ socio-emotional skills. For example, one or both members of a dyad needs to be able to accurately interpret and respond to the other’s nonverbal cues, such as facial expressions, to facilitate mutually responsive interactions. Little research, however, has examined whether and how mother and/or child facial expression decoding skill relates to dyads’ emotional mutuality during conversations. We thus examined associations between both mother and child facial expression decoding skill and observed emotional mutuality during parent-preschooler conversations about happy child memories. Results lend support to our hypotheses by suggesting that both mother and child capacities to read others’ emotional cues make distinct contributions to parent–child emotional mutuality in the context of reminiscing conversations. Specifically, mothers’ accurate decoding of child facial expressions predicted maternal displays of positive affect and interest, while children’s accurate decoding of adult facial expressions predicted dyadic displays of mutual enjoyment. Contrary to our hypotheses, however, parent/child facial expression decoding skills did not interact to predict observed mutual responsiveness. These findings underscore the importance of attending to both parent and child contributions to successful dyadic interactions that facilitate effective emotion socialization.     

The Distortion of the Role of Mother in Child Sexual Abuse

Child sexual abuse continues to be a problem despite efforts towards prevention. The burden of protecting children still falls mainly on women, yet society's general attitudes take away from women the tools they need in order to do this job. Early psychological literature added to this debasement, although there has been a turn around since the late 1970s. A review is given of these patterns. The recent literature points to the importance of empowering women so that children will be protected. A general discussion of useful concepts, actions, and interventions that move people towards empowerment is included.     

Facets of Agency in Stories of Transforming From Childless by Choice to Mother

Family scholars have explored in depth how and why some women choose to never have children. However, some childless‐by‐choice (also termed childfree or voluntarily childless) women—who have declared their desire and intention to never have children—ultimately become mothers because of changes in choice or circumstance. Through a qualitative analysis of interviews with mothers who once articulated themselves as permanently childless by choice, this article presents three facets of agency in women's stories about childbearing transformations: accidental conception, ambiguous desire, and purposeful decision. Participant interviews indicated that each facet of agency was enabled and constrained by multiple individual, relational, and cultural considerations, including self‐described biological urges, partners' childbearing desires and intentions, and cultural stigma against abortion. Pathways from childless by choice to mother often encompass multiple facets of agency and include movements in and out of various fertility desires and intentions before conceiving.     

From Community to Public Safety Governance in Policing and Child Protection

L'interopérabilité grandissante entre le maintien de l'ordre et la protection de l'enfant au Canada et au Royaume‐Uni semble indiquer que nous nous trouvons au milieu d'un changement gouvernemental passant de la gouvernance communautaire à une gouvernance de la sécurité publique. En effet, les discours mettant l'accent sur l'expertise locale en maintien de l'ordre et en protection de l'enfant se sont grandement transformés en raison des critiques sur le manque d'interdépendance entre les organismes. Les deux pays ont maintenant créé des bases de données interinstitutionnelles pour la gestion des personnes à risque. Cette intégration administrative engendre différentes formes de réglementations. Les auteurs concluent leur article en soutenant que cet ethos émergeant peut être conceptualisé comme une rationalité gouvernementale naissante. The growing interoperability between policing and child protection in Canada and the United Kingdom suggests that we are in the midst of a governmental shift from community governance to public safety governance. Indeed, discourses emphasizing local expertise in policing and child protection have largely muted because of criticisms over the lack of interagency interconnectedness. Both countries have now developed national interagency databases for the management of persons of risk. This institutional integration engenders different forms of regulation. We conclude by arguing that this emergent ethos may be conceptualized as a nascent governmental rationality.     

From Prevention to Partnership: Child Welfare Services Across Three Decades

SUMMARY. Throughout the lifetime of the NCB there have been significant changes of emphasis and direction in child welfare services in Britain, which are often reflected in the Bureau's own history. The priority given to the related spheres of child-care, child protection, delinquency control and preventive work with vulnerable families has shifted over the three decades and changed priorities have contributed to a changing service ethos. The new Children Act aims at balance and a fresh synthesis, centred on partnership; a concept which promises much but has yet to be fully tried and tested.     

Impact of Perpetrator Type on Attributions of Mother Fault in Child Sexual Abuse

Blaming nonoffending mothers for child sexual abuse has substantial negative consequences for both the mother and child victim. Although perpetrator type has been shown to influence how much blame and responsibility is placed on nonoffending mothers in child sexual abuse cases, research to date has focused primarily on perpetrators who are strangers to the child or the child’s biological father, ignoring the effect of other father-figure perpetrators. The current study examined how differences in perpetrator’s relationship to the mother impacted blame, responsibility, cause, and prevention as separate constructs. One hundred and eight participants from an online community sample were randomly assigned to read a vignette describing a child sexual abuse situation with a female victim and one of two perpetrators: the victim’s biological father or the mother’s boyfriend. Participants assigned significantly higher levels of fault for CSA to the mother when the perpetrator was the mother’s boyfriend. Implications and future directions are discussed.     

Promising Innovations in Child Welfare Education: Findings From a National Initiative

For many years, schools of social work have engaged in partnerships, especially with public child welfare agencies, to prepare a competent and professional child welfare workforce through the mechanism of Title IV-E training. In 2008 the National Child Welfare Workforce Institute (NCWWI) established an additional resource for preparing students in social work schools for child welfare practice. Twelve NCWWI traineeship programs supported a diverse group of BSW and MSW students from 2008 to 2013 and prepared them for client-centered practice informed by child welfare and leadership competencies. This article highlights a curriculum innovation in an MSW program and a field innovation in a BSW program that were designed to increase the readiness of BSW and MSW students for child welfare practice.     

Conceptualising and Categorising Child Abuse Inquiries: From Damage Control to Foregrounding Survivor Testimony

Testimony before inquiries into out‐of‐home care that have taken place in many countries over the last twenty years has severely disrupted received ideas about the quality of care given to children in the past. Evidence of the widespread abuse of children presented before recent inquiries internationally gives rise to the question: why didn’t we know? Part of the answer lies in the changing forms and functions of inquiries, whose interests they serve, how they are organised and how they gather evidence. Using as a case study, a survey of historical abuse inquiries in Australia, this article explores the shift to victim and survivor testimony and in so doing offers a new way of conceptualising and categorising historical child abuse inquiries. It focuses less on how inquiries are constituted or governed, and instead advances an historically contextualised approach that foregrounds the issue of who speaks and who is heard.     

From Sickly Survival to the Realisation of Potential: Child Health as a Social Project in Twentieth Century England

SUMMARY: During the last century the improvement of child health has become an important matter of public concern, reflecting preoccupations with the quality of the future adult population as well as with the current welfare of children. This paper traces some of the changing ideas and practices associated with this social project, from the late nineteenth century to the postwar years of the twentieth. From a period when survival beyond birth and infancy was the critical area of social concern to one when psychological adjustment and behaviour emerged as the essential indices of children's present and future health status.     

Child,Mother, Father,and Teacher Beliefs About Child Academic Competence: Predicting Math and Reading Performance in European American Adolescents

Beliefs about child competence in math and reading have important implications for academic performance in adolescence. However, it is unclear whether children's own beliefs are the most important predictor of their academic performance or whether parents’ and teachers’ beliefs about child competence influence child academic performance. We assessed mothers’, fathers’, teachers’, and children's beliefs about European American children's (N = 189) competence in math and reading at age 10 and children's math and language performance at ages 10, 13, and 18 years. Confirmatory factor models demonstrated that children's and teachers’ beliefs had lower loadings on a latent variable of child competence in math and reading than mothers’ beliefs. Children's self‐competence beliefs in math and reading were not significantly correlated, suggesting children may use dimensional comparisons when assessing their own competence. Mothers’, fathers’, and teachers’ assessments of child competence in math were strongly correlated with their assessments of child competence in reading. Controlling for stability in academic performance, family socioeconomic status, and other reporters, mothers and fathers who rated their children's math competence higher had adolescents who performed better in math, and fathers who rated their children's reading competence higher had adolescents who performed better in language tasks. However, children who rated their own competence higher in math and reading had lower math and language (for girls only) performance in adolescence. European American children may use dimensional comparisons that render them poorer judges of their math and reading competence than parents.     

What Parents Learn From Experience: The First Child as a First Draft?

This study sought evidence for the proposition that experiences with earlier‐born adolescents will improve parents' interactions with and parenting of later‐born adolescents. Participants were mothers, fathers, and both first‐ and second‐born siblings from 392 families participating in a longitudinal study. To collect information on siblings' family experiences, family members were interviewed individually in their homes. During the subsequent 2 to 3 weeks, 7 evening telephone interviews were also conducted, which focused on siblings' daily activities. Findings suggest that when parent‐adolescent relationships were measured at the same age for both siblings, parents experienced less conflict with their second‐born as compared with their firstborn adolescent offspring and exhibited greater knowledge of their second‐born offspring's daily activities as compared with their firstborns' daily experiences. These results are consistent with the notion that parents may learn from their childrearing experiences.     

From Policy to Practice: The Implementation and Negotiation of Technologies in Everyday Child Welfare

A central element of the Every Child Matters reforms in England are measures which aim at improving information sharing. Amongst these are the children’s database and the Common Assessment Framework, both representing technological solutions to long‐standing concerns about information sharing in child welfare. This article reports some findings from an Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)‐funded study which examined their introduction and use in everyday professional practice. Substantial differences in policy implementation, access to and use of the technologies, draw attention to the importance of the localised and situated contexts into which these technologies are being introduced, raising serious questions about their future development as national standard systems.     

From Freud to Feminism: Gendered Constructions of Blame Across Theories of Child Sexual Abuse

Most theories of child sexual abuse are, to some degree, gendered, with nonoffending mothers bearing the burden of blame, ideologically and legally, for the transgressions of predominantly male offenders. This article explores the social construction of blame for child sexual abuse via critical analyses of evolving theoretical perspectives on maternal culpability for the inception and maintenance of abuse dynamics. Drawing on selected conceptual and research knowledge that supports and refutes anecdotal claims, this synthesis of the literature culminates in the proposal of an evidence-informed, feminist-grounded, multitheoretical child sexual abuse framework that disrupts dominant mother-blaming discourse and guides socially just and ethically responsive policy, practice, and research.     

From a Given to a Construct

The transition towards a cognitive and post-industrial economy has led to the emergence of new strategies of capture of the immanent productive capacities of the social forces. Heritage entities are subject to, and also participate in, processes by which common creativity and knowledge are being harnessed by novel forms of rent and control. The objective of this paper was to show that conceiving heritage as a common situated in specific contexts rather than as a universal essence can open up novel epistemological spheres of communication between different knowledge practices. Also, it can help bridge some ontological gaps among the various stakeholders in the arena of heritage, such as academics, managers, architects, local communities and market forces. This entails considering heritage as an emergent material and immaterial construction process involving many different agents. Currently, these processes tend towards the privatization of common values and the shattering of local communities. Normally, this situation entails a fundamental alienation between objects and subjects, and the reification of heritage. This paper suggests that considering heritage as a common could provide a different perspective to tackle this crucial problem. Accordingly, scholars should not only be bound to a critical discursive stance, but should also commit to ‘ontological politics’ that would situate them as mediators between the global hierarchies of value generated by heritage and the common productive potential of local communities.