Sibling Relationships and Influences in Childhood and Adolescence

The authors review the literature on sibling relationships in childhood and adolescence, starting by tracing themes from foundational research and theory and then focusing on empirical research during the past 2 decades. This literature documents siblings' centrality in family life, sources of variation in sibling relationship qualities, and the significance of siblings for child and adolescent development and adjustment. Sibling influences emerge not only in the context of siblings' frequent and often emotionally intense interactions but also by virtue of siblings' role in larger family system dynamics. Although siblings are building blocks of family structure and key players in family dynamics, their role has been relatively neglected by family scholars and by those who study close relationships. Incorporating study of siblings into family research provides novel insights into the operation of families as social and socializing systems.     

Childhood studies,children's politics and participation: perspectives for processes of democratisation

ABSTRACT

From the early Frankfurt School through to the work of Manuel Castells, there has been a rich body of work on the cleavage between technological and social developments of the twentieth century in respect of the consequences for the constitution of subjectivity. However, little attention is paid to the role of children during their childhoods in attempts to bridge this gap beyond discussions about the democratic actors children will become when they are adults. This paper argues that only the full integration of children, during their childhoods, into democratic development of societies will prevent the deepening of the rift between technological and social progress. The paper traces the correspondence between the new childhood studies and those concepts of politics and politicisation which can support social progress towards an emancipatory social perspective undergirded by particular and democratisation of all areas of everyday life. Drawing on Bourdieu and ideas of participation as action, the paper critically examines the various mechanisms by which children are conventionally excluded from democratic participation and then explores how a deeper consideration of agency in childhood and social actorship opens up alternative mechanisms of inclusion and the concomitant expansion of the concept of democracy.     

On Childhood and the Logic of Difference: Some Empirical Examples

This article argues that universal documents on children’s rights can provide illustrative examples as to how childhood is identified as a unity using difference as an instrument. Using Gille Deleuze’s theorising on difference and sameness as a framework, the article seeks to relate the children’s rights project with a critique of representation. It seeks to illustrate how the children’s rights project seems to be promoting an image of childhood that is sharply contrasted by adulthood in a dichotomised sense, as well as how, in these documents, the fate of the child is being intertwined with the fate of the state.     

Children of Exception: Redefining Categories of Illegality and Citizenship in Canada

This article examines legal discourses on precarious status children in Canada over the last decade. Drawing on different theoretical frameworks and taking into account laws and court decisions, the paper will examine the way in which precarious status children are regarded as powerless subjects in need of protection and as threatening others. The article argues that these two apparently contrasting discourses are embedded within specific socio‐historical constructions of childhood and children's citizenship which deny and limit their agency and conceive of their claim to membership as illegitimate. In the case of precarious status children, illegality and citizenship need to be redefined in a developmental perspective, questioning the potential risks associated with prevalent moral and social assumptions on childhood.     

Service Provision for Preschool Children Who Are Deaf

ABSTRACT

The data reported have been derived from the first national review of preschool service provision for deaf children and their families. This paper examines the kinds of service provision seen as desirable by families with deaf children between 0 and 5 years of age in relation to current UK Government interest in: Universal Neonatal Hearing Screening, family support initiatives including a focus on parent-professional partnerships, and Inclusive Education. Data presented includes families& responses to early identification; the information available following identification; perceptions of their own partnerships with professionals; and the value of family centred services for themselves, their children and for family life. From these data, aspects of good practice are identified and illustrated for consideration in future service development.     

The Media Abuse of Children. Jake's Progress from Demonic Icon to Restored Childhood Innocent

While scholarly analysis of child protection and the media has grown substantially during the 1990s (Aldridge, 1994; Franklin and Parton, 1991; Kitzinger and Skidmore, 1995), studies have ignored a crucial dimension which forms the focus for discussion here. We wish to suggest that media reporting of children and child abuse may itself constitute an abusive activity. Media presentations of children and childhood, since press coverage of the Bulger case in 1993, have assumed a distinctive and sinister guise which, we argue, fundamentally revises the previously held perception of children and childhood. We suggest that this new understanding of childhood is damaging to children and, because of the impact of such media presentations on the public mood and policy climate, harms their interests. The discussion is in three parts. First, newspaper reporting of the Bulger case is analysed to reveal how coverage challenged the idea of childhood as a period of innocence and replaced it with a perception of childhood as essentially ‘evil’. Second, the characterization of Jake, the central figure in Alan Bleasdale's recent television dramaJake's Progress, is analysed to serve as an illustrative exemplar of this new construction of childhood. Finally, we consider the possible messages conveyed by such presentations to perpetrators and victims of abuse.     

The Trouble with Bullying – Deconstructing the Conventional Definition of Bullying for a Child‐centred Investigation into Children's Use of Social Media

This article deconstructs the conventional definition of bullying through analysis of its historical context, and identifies blind spots using lenses of gender, culture and setting. We explore theoretical and methodological problems associated with the conventional definition and its axiomatic use in bullying research, with particular reference to online bullying. We argue that because children may use ‘bullying’ to mean many different practices not captured in the conventional definition, using this definition often obscures the very phenomena researchers are aiming to describe. As a result, adults risk missing these practices in research and for interventions that use these studies as their evidence base.     

My Family through the Lens. Photo Interviews with Children and Sensitive Aspects of Family Life

We elaborate on an aspect of photo interviews with children that has so far not been considered sufficiently: Photographs may encourage children to talk about sensitive aspects of family life. The potential and limitations of this aspect are discussed along the lines of visibility and invisibility. Visualisations support children in verbalising their thoughts, but also stimulate narrations on issues that are not displayed. Data are drawn from interviews with fifty 10‐year‐old children who took photographs in their families, and their parents (n = 71). We conclude that visual methods and their combination with a multiple perspectives approach may generate substantial benefits in childhood and family research.     

Perspectives of Looked after Children on School Experience — a Study Conducted among Primary School Children in a Children’s Home in Singapore

Singapore is known for its well‐developed public education. Although there have been prolific studies and advancement in pedagogy of different groups of learners, the progress has yet to capture the interest of children in residential care, and their educational needs remain a field lacking in discussion. This study seeks to give these children a voice by answering three main questions: (1) What have the children experienced in school? (2) How do they feel about these experiences? (3) To what extent are the children’s experiences and feelings related to their background?A mixed‐method approach that encompasses both quantitative and qualitative instruments has been employed to find out from the Primary School children in a local Children’s Home their perspectives on school experience. The findings reveal that looked after children do encounter greater challenges in school because of their unique background and lack of resources. Most of them would need to rely on the authorities in both the school and the Home for support if better experience and performance in school are to be achieved.     

Traumatic Childhood and Marriage

Abstract

This exploratory, qualitative study of 84 adults who have survived and transcended a traumatic childhood describes the role their spouses played in the process of rising above their difficult childhood experiences. The participants talked about what they were looking for in a spouse, negative marriage experiences, and the positive role spousal support played in transcending the traumatic childhood. The study of their lives reveals important insights into the role of marriage in the process by which people grow into healthy adults. These insights will be useful to people who work with couples in which one person is seeking to leave past difficulties behind.     

Childhood Sexual Abuse Severity Reconsidered: A Factor Structure of CSA Characteristics

To address the lack of empirically grounded measures of childhood sexual abuse severity, a survey of self-report items was developed following a thorough review of the childhood sexual abuse literature. An exploratory factor analysis was conducted using data collected from a convenience sample of college students that included 275 females and males with a history of childhood sexual abuse. The solution produced seven factors interpreted as the following: (a) less intrusive forms of childhood sexual abuse (e.g., sexual invitations, kissing), (b) more intrusive forms of childhood sexual abuse (e.g., oral sex, intercourse), (c) humiliation/fear, (d) childhood sexual abuse involving photography, (e) familiarity with the perpetrator, (f) physical force/rape, and (g) active digital penetration. Correlations among these factors further suggested the existence of two relatively independent second-order factors, one based on the levels of physical intrusiveness and the other composed of the psychological/emotional factors. While arguably the most common measurement of severity, physical intrusiveness had little association with critical factors such as humiliation, fear, and association with the perpetrator. Consequently, physical intrusiveness appears to be an inadequate stand-alone measure of childhood sexual abuse severity. These results are proposed to lay the groundwork for an improved, more comprehensive measure of childhood sexual abuse severity.     

The Burden of Deportation on Children in Mexican Immigrant Families

In 2011, a record number of foreign‐born individuals were detained and removed from the United States. This article looks at the impact enforcement policies have had on Mexican families more broadly and children specifically. Drawing on interviews with 91 parents and 110 children in 80 households, the author suggests that, similar to the injury pyramid used by public health professionals, a deportation pyramid best depicts the burden of deportation on children. At the top of the pyramid are instances that have had the most severe consequences on children's daily lives: families in which a deportation has led to permanent family dissolution. But enforcement policies have had the greatest impact on children at the bottom of the pyramid. Regardless of legal status or their family members' involvement with immigration authorities, children in Mexican immigrant households describe fear about their family stability and confusion over the impact legality has on their lives.     

At the Age of Twelve: Migrant Children and the Disruption of Multicultural Belonging

This paper troubles seductive discourses of Canadian multiculturalism and the centrality of whiteness to national belonging, highlighting how migrant children understand and navigate assimilation. Evolving out of childhood migration stories shared by 12 interviewees in the documentary Twelve, the article addresses the ways ‘childist’ logics are used to separate childhood from the realities of race and racism. In working towards anti‐racist praxis, we address how storytelling challenges adult–child power hierarchies, exposing how childhood continues to be framed as a time of innocence, disconnected from the violence, danger and pain involved in migrating to Anglophone Canada.     

Practice with Transgendered Children

SUMMARY

Utilizing an ecological framework and based on the existing literature and research, as well as my own 24 years of clinical practice with children, youth, and families, this paper examines gender variant childhood development from a holistic viewpoint where children and en-vironments are understood as a unit, in the context of their relationship to one another. This chapter is limited to a discussion regarding the recogni-tion of gender identity; an examination of the adaptation process through which gender variant children deal with the stress of an environment where there is not a “goodness of fit” and a discussion of the overall de-velopmental tasks of a transgendered childhood. Recommendations for social work practice with gender variant children are presented in the con-clusion of the paper.     

Childhood innocence and experience: Memory,discourse and practice

This article examines how childhood innocence is taken up in (92) memories of undergraduate students across four sites in the US and Canada. Drawing from Foucault's theory of discourse, we examine how three themes—innocence as not knowing, innocence as being provided for, and loss of innocence as exposure to adversity—construct childhood as the absence of conflict, which perpetuates the myth of an innocence/experience binary and encourages a deficit perspective of childhood. These findings contribute to teacher education and childhood studies by highlighting the importance of interrogating adult memories in order to disrupt normative assumptions about children.     

Infancy and Childhood in India: A Critical Review

Empirical studies of childhood in India have been rare. Guided by universalistic theories of child development, developmental psychologists have seldom examined cultural variations in child-rearing patterns with Indian samples. Psychoanalytic studies of Hindu childhood have been influenced by therapeutic observations with segmented middle-class populations that are generally Westernized and educated, inviting a lively debate about the transferability of psychoanalytic individualism to non-Western contexts. Anthropological studies, invariably focused on cultural variation, have not searched for consistent cultural patterns in ethnographic materials on Hindu socialization. Based on fieldwork conducted in a village near Delhi, this article presents one of the first systematic quantitative and ethnographic studies of patterns of child care in Hindu extended families during the preschool years. The findings are discussed in terms of achieving a consensus between developmental, psychoanalytic, and anthropological observations of Indian childhood.     

Childhood Ethics: An ontological advancement for childhood studies

We describe an ontological approach to childhood studies that we refer to as Childhood Ethics. This involves an interdisciplinary hermeneutic orientation towards examining the morally meaningful dimensions of matters that affect young people. We draw on our empirical research with young people from 3- to 17-years old, examining their experiences in a diversity of contexts and geographical settings. Our investigations challenge dominant binary conceptions of young people along lines of decisional in/capacity and im/maturity. We argue for a view of children as active agents with meaningful relational engagements and participation interests and capacities and outline corresponding implications for research and practice.