Play as a Resource for Children Facing Adversity: An Exploration of Indicative Case Studies

In this paper, we suggest that the ability and opportunity to play affords children a natural resource to meet intellectual and emotional challenge. Analysis of case studies focusing on interventions with children caught in the bombing of Beirut, children abandoned to the state system in Romania, and the street children in Rio de Janeiro and Cali is used to support this view. When resources are in deficit, challenge is more likely to become adversity. The impact of adversity is particular to context, but comparison across contexts also shows connections between children’s disparate experiences. Analysis confirms that given the opportunity, children interact with and influence their environment through play and that this process provides a resource to meet the challenge of adversity.     

Interdisciplinary Studies of Childhood Ethics: Developing a New Field of Inquiry

The principal aim of this investigation was to help develop ‘Interdisciplinary Studies of Childhood Ethics’ as a new field of inquiry. We identified: (i) current intra‐disciplinary and interdisciplinary knowledge gaps in childhood ethics; and (ii) priorities for future research and development. A prominent problem, highlighted within and across disciplines, relates to how the best interests standard should be reconciled with the recognition of children as agents. This project makes an innovative contribution by promoting the development of interdisciplinary childhood ethics knowledge and standards, informing future improvements in childhood research and services.     

Psychosocial Well‐Being and the Relationship Between Divorce and Children's Academic Achievement

As an unprecedented number of children live in families experiencing divorce, researchers have developed increasingly complex explanations for the consequences associated with marital dissolution. Current accounts focus on changes to family finances, destabilized parenting practices, elevated parental conflict, and deterioration of the parent–child relationship, to explain the impact of divorce. A less studied explanation draws attention to children's diminished psychosocial well‐being following divorce. Using data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study—Kindergarten cohort (ECLS‐K) (N = 10,061), I examined the role of psychosocial well‐being in the relationship between divorce and children's outcomes. The results suggest that divorce is associated with diminished psychosocial well‐being in children, and that this decrease helps explain the connection between divorce and lower academic achievement.     

Implications of Childhood Externalizing Problems for Young Adults

This study uses data from a national sample of married individuals and their offspring to explore the relationships between childhood externalizing problems and adult psychological well‐being, social support, and intimate relationship quality. The results indicate that childhood problems predict lower levels of adult psychological well‐being, kin support, and relationship quality. The relationship between childhood problems and adult intimate relationship quality, and that between childhood problems and later parent‐child relationship quality, is explained after accounting for the reciprocal influences of childhood problems and the quality of teen parent‐child relations. This finding suggests that the best way for parents to prevent and offset their offspring's difficulties is to maintain quality relationships with them.     

Gutter to Garden: Historical Discourses of Risk in Interventions in Working Class Children’s Street Play

This article investigates interventions in the gutter play of British working class children in the first decade of the 20th century through their re‐location within Free Kindergartens. In contemporary literature, the street child was viewed through a binary lens, as both ‘at risk’ and ‘as risk’, reflecting wider societal discourses in a period of rapidly developing social policy. The paper interrogates the motivations of free kindergarten activists from the standpoint of a range of theory and builds on recent papers discussing 21st century urban childhoods. The findings suggest both historical continuities and discontinuities in the theorisation of risk, which have implications for current social policy, urban design and early childhood education. The questions raised include issues of children’s rights, citizenship, inclusion and cultural diversity.     

Mothers' and Fathers' Well‐Being in Parenting Across the Arch of Child Development

Limited research on parental well‐being by child age suggests that parents are better off with very young children despite intense time demands of caring for them. This study uses the American Time Use Survey Well‐Being Module (N = 18,124) to assess how parents feel in activities with children of different ages. Results show that parents are worse off with adolescent children relative to young children. Parents report the lowest levels of happiness with adolescents relative to younger children, and mothers report more stress and less meaning with adolescents. Controlling for contextual features of parenting including activity type, solo parenting, and restorative time does not fully account for the adolescent disadvantage in fathers' happiness or mothers' stress. This study highlights adolescence as a particularly difficult stage for parental well‐being and shows that mothers shoulder stress that fathers do not, even after accounting for differences in the context of their parenting activities.     

Fathering With Multiple Partners: Links to Children's Well‐Being in Early Childhood

The claim that multiple partner fertility may pose a risk of adverse outcomes for children has not been tested. We test this argument using a sample of 4,027 resident fathers and children from the Fragile Families and Child Well‐being Survey by examining the pathways through which fathers' multipartnered fertility is associated with children's externalizing behaviors and physical health status at 36 months. Path analyses indicate that multiple partner fertility exerted both a significant direct and indirect effect through paternal depression to influence children's externalizing behaviors. Fathers' multiple partner fertility also exerted a significant indirect effect through one mediator—father involvement—to influence children's physical health. This evidence suggests that the disruptions brought about by multipartnered fertility are important for understanding child well‐being.     

Symptoms of Mental Health Problems: Children’s and Adolescents’ Understandings and Implications for Gender Differences in Help Seeking

Amidst concerns that young people’s mental health is deteriorating, it is important to explore their understandings of symptoms of mental health problems and beliefs around help seeking. Drawing on focus group data from Scottish school pupils, we demonstrate how they understood symptoms of mental health problems and how their characterisations of these symptoms as ‘rare’ and ‘weird’ informed participants’ perceptions that peers, teachers and parents would respond to disclosure in stigmatising ways. Consequently, participants suggested that they would delay or avoid disclosing symptoms of mental health problems. We highlight subtle gender and age differences and outline implications for policy and practice.     

Profiles of Risk: Maternal Health,Socioeconomic Status,and Child Health

Child health is fundamental to well‐being and achievement throughout the life course. Prior research has demonstrated strong associations between familial socioeconomic resources and children's health outcomes, with especially poor health outcomes among disadvantaged youth who experience a concentration of risks, yet little is known about the influence of maternal health as a dimension of risk for children. This research used nationally representative U.S. data from the National Health Interview Surveys in 2007 and 2008 (N = 7,361) to evaluate the joint implications of maternal health and socioeconomic disadvantage for youth. Analyses revealed that maternal health problems were present in a substantial minority of families, clustered meaningfully with other risk factors, and had serious implications for children's health. These findings support the development of health policies and interventions aimed at families.     

The Intergenerational Consequences of Parental Health Limitations

Scholars have theorized interrelationships between family members' health and well‐being. Though prior research demonstrates associations between parents' and children's health, less is known about the relationship between parental health limitations and children's behavioral and academic outcomes. This article uses data from the Fragile Families and Child Well being Study (N = 3,273) to estimate the relationship between parental health limitations and four aspects of children's well‐being. Findings reveal that mothers' health limitations, especially when they occur in middle childhood or chronically, are independently associated with greater internalizing and externalizing behaviors, lower verbal ability, and worse overall health at age 9. Fathers' health limitations are not associated with children's well‐being. Fathers exert influence in other ways, as the relationship between mothers' chronic health limitations and children's internalizing behaviors is concentrated among children not residing with their fathers. These findings support the development of policies and interventions aimed at families.     

Mothers' and Fathers' Work Hours,Child Gender,and Behavior in Middle Childhood

This study examined the association between typical parental work hours (including nonemployed parents) and children's behavior in two‐parent heterosexual families. Child behavior was measured by the Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL) at ages 5, 8, and 10 in the Western Australian Pregnancy Cohort (Raine) Study (N = 4,201 child‐year observations). Compared to those whose fathers worked fewer hours per week, children whose fathers worked 55 hours or more per week had significantly higher levels of externalizing behavior. This association was not explained by father–child time during the week, poorer family functioning, or overreactive parenting practice. Further, when stratifying the analysis by child gender, this association appeared to exist only in boys. Mothers' work hours were unrelated to children's behavioral problems. The role of parent and child gender in the relationships between parental work hours and children's behavioral problems, together with mediating factors, warrants further investigation.     

Marital Conflict Trajectories and Associations With Children's Disruptive Behavior

We seek to identify heterogeneous trajectories of marital conflict during the early childhood period, identify predictors associated with these trajectories, and examine associations between trajectory group membership and children's disruptive behavior. Participants were 469 families examined 4 times when the children were 2 to 54 months of age. Maternal reports of marital conflict, adverse childhood experiences, depressive symptoms, and sociodemographic characteristics were collected, and averaged maternal and paternal reports of child disruptive problems were used. Using growth mixture modeling, 3 trajectories of marital conflict were identified: high increasing (21.8%), high decreasing (7%), and low stable (71.2%). Maternal adverse childhood experiences predicted increased risk of belonging in the high‐increasing group, whereas depressive symptoms predicted increased risk of belonging in the high‐decreasing group. Importantly, children of mothers in the high‐increasing group exhibited higher levels of disruptive behavior at 54 months when compared with children of mothers in the high‐decreasing and low‐stable groups.     

Childhood Sexual Abuse and Brain Development: A Discussion of Associated Structural Changes and Negative Psychological Outcomes

The effects of traumatic exposure have been researched for many years and studies have shown that the parts of the brain affected by sexually traumatic experiences in childhood are also linked to many physical and psychological problems, such as depression, posttraumatic stress disorder, somatic complaints and suicide. Neuroimaging studies have provided a breadth of evidence that childhood sexual abuse is related to structural changes in the brain. Taken together, childhood sexual abuse affects brain development, leading to differences in brain anatomy and functioning that have lifelong consequences for mental health. Several limitations of neuroimaging research on childhood sexual abuse are discussed, including a lack of refined and sensitive neuroimaging measures and problems interpreting results of structural imaged subjects with associated psychiatric conditions. Future, large‐scale studies are warranted to examine the type and severity of the sexual abuse and how each of the levels of childhood sexual abuse contributes to structural and functional changes. Furthermore, future studies are needed to control for comorbid psychiatric conditions in order to disentangle the effects of childhood sexual abuse from psychiatric conditions that damage brain development. © 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

‘Childhood sexual abuse affects brain development, leading to differences in brain anatomy and functioning that have lifelong consequences for mental health’

Key Practitioner Messages

• Childhood sexual abuse is linked to observable structural changes in the brain.
• These structural changes in the brain are associated with a myriad number of negative psychological effects.
• Research is limited in elucidating the role of childhood sexual abuse on brain development, as the bulk of the research has focused only broadly on child maltreatment.

     

Is It Good to be Gifted? The Social Construction of the Gifted Child

There is growing evidence that children labelled as academically gifted are subjected to negative attitudes from others and that this impacts on their self‐esteem and motivation to succeed. Through an analysis of British newspaper stories about gifted children, this article explores the socially constructed nature of the concept of the ‘gifted child’ and finds that children identified as gifted academically are framed more negatively than those who are exceptionally able in music or sport. The article questions the growing practice of labelling children as academically gifted in English schools given the negative stereotypes that surround this classification.     

Family Structure States and Transitions: Associations With Children's Well‐Being During Middle Childhood

Using longitudinal data from the Maternal and Child Supplement of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (N = 3,862) and Hierarchical Linear Models, we estimated associations of family structure states and transitions with children's achievement and behavior trajectories during middle childhood. Results suggest that residing in a single‐mother family was associated with small increases in behavior problems and decreases in achievement and that residing in a social‐father family was associated with small increases in behavior problems. Family structure transitions, in general, were associated with increases in behavior problems and marginally associated with decreases in achievement. Transitioning to a single‐mother family was associated with increases in behavior problems, whereas transitioning to a social‐father family was associated with decreases in reading achievement.     

Understanding Unique Effects of Parental Incarceration on Children: Challenges,Progress, and Recommendations

Growth in U.S. incarceration rates during the 1980s and 1990s prompted a body of research focused on understanding the diverse effects of incarceration on individuals, families, and communities. An area of particular interest has been how the incarceration of a parent may affect child well‐being. Despite what appears to be converging evidence that parental incarceration poses a significant threat to child development, this area of inquiry has yet to overcome important methodological and conceptual challenges related to selection bias. It is therefore unclear whether the difficulties that have been observed among children whose parents are incarcerated are due to the incarceration itself or to other adversities that children have experienced. The purpose of this article is to draw attention to these issues, to summarize empirical and conceptual progress in overcoming these challenges, and to suggest directions for future research.     

Early Childhood Development Plus Violence Prevention in Low‐ and Middle‐Income Countries: A Qualitative Study

Violence exposure can negatively impact early childhood development (ECD), yet limited research exists in low‐ and middle‐income countries (LMICs). This study aimed to determine what effective integration of ECD plus violence prevention (ECD+VP) can look like in LMICs. Seventeen key informants were selected using purposive sampling, representing U.N. agencies, donors, implementers and research organisations. Using open coding of semi‐structured interviews, the authors identify five priority areas for promoting an integrated ECD+VP agenda: (i) parenting and parent child relationships, (ii) family systems, (iii) development in an ecological context, (iv) system strengthening and integration, and (v) building and translating evidence.     

Parental Strains and Rewards Among Mothers: The Role of Education

Using data from the NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development (N = 1,198), this study examines the associations between education and parental strains and rewards among mothers of young children. Findings indicate that a college degree or more is related to less parenting anxiety, but more role captivity, and less new life meaning from parenting than lower levels of education. Differences by education are partly explained by variation in levels of progressive parenting values and work commitment, but remain significant. These patterns indicate that education provides greater resources that ease parental anxiety, but also leads to greater perceived demands of having a successful career, which contribute to more role captivity and less new life meaning from parenting.