Children as codesigners of new technologies: valuing the imagination to transform what is possible

The technological complexity and richness of a child's environment today is far beyond what any adults today experienced when they were growing up. For example, no adult today knows what it is like to be a four-year-old using his or her first iPhone app or Webkinz account. Therefore, we seek ways to understand what children need in today's new technologies even without ourselves being children. Since 1999, young people ages seven to eleven have been the author's partners in codesigning new educational technologies at the University of Maryland's Human-Computer Interaction Lab. This work has helped inform who children are--what matters to them, what technologies need to be changed, and what needs to be built for the future. This work uses cooperative inquiry, a set of codesign methods that can enable adults and children to share their ideas while minimizing the differences in age and communication styles. This article describes low-tech methods for brainstorming, offering feedback, and supporting creative change in technology prototype designs. Examples of technologies are discussed and insights from children shared.     

‘IF I FEEL LIKE THIS,HOW DOES THE CHILD FEEL?’ CHILD PROTECTION WORKERS,SUPERVISION, MANAGEMENT AND ORGANISATIONAL RESPONSES TO PARENTAL VIOLENCE

This study analysed workers’ experiences of supervision following interactions with hostile and intimidating parents. This analysis examined management and organisational responses to worker stress, and assessed the adequacy of support that workers received. An online survey was designed to collect data on workers’ experiences and free text responses were qualitatively analysed for references to the supervision they received in response to working with parents. 590 participants responded to the survey. 402 were qualified social workers, and 423 worked in child protection. Participants had experienced a range of violent behaviour from parents. The overwhelming theme in responses was the lack of support and supervision workers received, often in stressful and frightening circumstances. Approximately one quarter of participants only used organisational procedures, guidelines or protocols on dealing with hostile parents. Workers reported that mismanaged parental hostility affected their practice and the quality of protection that children received. The violence experienced had a significant negative impact on their personal and professional lives. Organisational responses in the form of supervision and education were often inadequate and resulted in children receiving reduced quality of protection. Recommendations for policy and practice change are discussed, with the aim of caring for workers and the children they protect.     

Involving Young People—Empowerment or Exploitation?

The principle that children should be heard as well as seen—that they have a right to be consulted over decisions affecting them and to have their views taken into account by the adults working with or for them—now has general currency. One consequence is that increasing numbers of children and young people are now appearing on conference platforms or are included on the executive councils of charities or participate in working parties. Such events are often effective, but sometimes they can be embarrassing or counter-productive to all concerned. Amanda Allard considers the lessons to be learnt from a successful initiative to involve young people in policy advocacy.     

'Doing Motherhood': some experiences of mothers with physical disabilities

In this paper, we discuss the experiences of physically disabled mothers. We interviewed 30 women in the age group 28-49 with medical diagnoses such as: multiple sclerosis, neuromuscular diseases, cerebral palsy and spinal cord injury Becoming a mother implied for many 'capturing' a gender or 'recapturing' a lost gender. They women felt they had to go to great lengths to 'present' themselves and their children as managing 'normally' in order to be accepted as 'ordinary' mothers. Eventually, they feared that their children might be taken away from them if they did not live up to other people's expectations. One possible explanation for what they experienced as other people's scepticism might be that disabled people on the whole are primarily still looked upon as being dependent on other people's help and care. In short, they are often looked upon by professionals and lay people as receivers, and not as carers.     

“Bad Things Happened”: How Children of the Digital Age Make Sense of Violent Current Events

Digital technologies collapse distance and accelerate the speed at which information travels. This has made it easier for children to encounter violent clashes from across the globe. Thus, the digital era has raised new questions for educators about how to teach current events in an increasingly globalized world. When children have easy access to information, how do they make sense of what they see and hear? When world events take a violent turn, what cognitive and emotional sense-making strategies do children employ? And, in light of children’s developing thoughts and feelings about global affairs, what role should educators play in helping children make sense of violent current events? This research explores these questions by examining one particular case of children’s understanding of violent current events. Through interviews and storytelling exercises it investigates how a group of Jewish children in the United States attempted to make sense of the 2014 war between Israel and Hamas, interrogating the cognitive and emotional sense-making strategies that the children employed. In doing so it highlights the opportunities and challenges of current events education at a time of unprecedented global connectivity.     

Generation,resistance, and survival: African-American children and the Southampton Rebellion of 1831

The Southampton Rebellion of 1831, Nat Turner’s Rebellion, stands as the most famous slave rebellion in American History. Historians have studied the rebellion extensively often focusing on Turner’s biography, the incident’s violent sequence of events, and the wide social, cultural, and political impact of the rebellion. The most recent scholarship on the Southampton Rebellion focuses on the wider community that produced the violent event that resulted in the death of nearly 60 whites and an uncountable number of people of color. African-American children made up a significant demographic in antebellum Southampton. They were present everywhere, just as children were present in most antebellum communities. Yet their appearances in the trial records associated with the Southampton Rebellion are all but unstudied. The Southampton Rebellion was not the result of Nat Turner’s singular genius focused on immediate results. It was a rebellion constituted in the community with future liberation in mind. Children, the literal embodiment of slavery’s future, then were necessarily included and involved. This article engages the extensive court documents associated with the Southampton Rebellion’s aftermath to investigate the possible role of children in the rebellion and their significance to the resistance of enslaved communities.     

Adoption,personality disorder and parental guilt: Implications of genetic research for social work

Few adoptive parents are aware that serious behavioral and personality problems can occur in adopted children. When such problems are manifested, parents are often guilt-ridden, believing that they are to blame. Recent research suggests that the risks associated with adoption may be genetically linked. Social workers who counsel adoptive parents need to be aware of potential problems, explain possible risks to them, and use these research findings to positive effect.     

“The Cake and Custard is Good!” A Qualitative Study of Teenage Childrens' Experience of being in Prison

This qualitative study aims to uncover how young people, sentenced for violent offences, experience prison, something about which we know very little. It reports life history data from qualitative interviews with young male inmates aged 16–18 years convicted of violent assault. The findings indicate that the intrusive and inescapable challenges of incarceration are filtered through the boys' interpretations of previous critical incidents in their lives, in a way that can, it is argued, cause them additional harm. Respecting and attempting to understand the complex experiences of the participants, listening to the voices of these children, may help us to understand why a prison sentence seems to have limited impact on recidivism.     

When Emotion Work is Doomed to Fail: Ideological and Structural Constraints on Emotion Management

This paper explores how workers try to manage their emotions under conditions that doom them to fail. The workers in question—floor instructors at a sheltered workshop for people with developmental disabilities—were expected to infuse clients with positive feelings about work and to help transform them into committed workers. But structural conditions—boring, poorly paid assembly work and long gaps between contract jobs—forced them to obtain clients' compliance through coercive and confrontational emotion management techniques that contradicted their ideological beliefs. The floor instructors sought to peacefully increase their control over clients through “preventive emotion management” but most often they experienced a loss of control, leading some of them to experience “burnout.” This paper defines burnout as “occupational emotional deviance” that workers experience when they cannot manage their own and other's emotions according to organizational expectations.     

流动儿童的社会福利现状与发展策略

流动儿童是跟随农民工父母或其他监护人进入城市生活或学习的0-16岁农村户籍儿童。我国流动儿童的各项社会福利已取得显著进展,包括营养与健康、教育机会与教育质量、家庭与社会支持等。但是,流动儿童的社会福利水平仍有待提高,许多福利不平等问题亟待解决。为此,需建立新型的以“常住人口”为服务对象的管理模式,建立流动儿童登记管理制度,建立健全流动儿童社会福利工作协作机制等。     

Violent Marriages

This paper addresses the questions of why many people are violent toward those they claim to love and why many people stay with those who hurt them. Patterns of relationship within violent marriages, the characteristics of individuals involved and societal values are explored for answers. Some thoughts on therapy are presented.     

Notes on Monetary Institutions in State and Class Formation Processes

Charles Tilly emphasizes that state formation is a contingent and violent process: states develop as they extract resources, including currency, from a population. Neochartalist approaches to money challenge what I call the extractivist view of state formation because they see currencies as public institutions established by governments, not a resource to be seized from a population. At the same time, neochartalists rarely address how state institutions capable of establishing monetary institutions emerge. In this article, I propose a framework to analyze the entangled development of the institutions of money and state. I then showcase its usefulness by revisiting a series of crowd actions and militarized responses in eighteenth-century Massachusetts and Pennsylvania today known as Shays’ Rebellion and the Whiskey Rebellion, focusing on the initially ad hoc and then routinized funding mechanism that enabled emerging state actors to deploy armed groups. In closing, I argue that despite the violence involved in the emergence of the institutions of state and money, citizens and inhabitants can begin to imagine democratic ways of institutionalizing money today.     

Opportunities Lost––Why Some Parents of Young Children Are Not Well-Connected to the Service Systems Designed to Assist Them

Abstract

Evidence on how to engage isolated parents in formal services tends to rely on professional commentary, practitioner discourse, and parents who use services. It is critical to also hear the perspectives of isolated parents to inform practice and service design, yet there are clearly practical difficulties in researchers talking directly to families who do not use services–– not the least of which is how to find them. This paper reports on in-depth interviews with 20 financially disadvantaged sole parents of young children in the inner north of Canberra who define themselves as not well-connected to services. The study finds that these parents often lack the social networks needed to “introduce” them to services; their contacts with formal services in the past have left them feeling judged and under surveillance, and the services which they regularly “brush up” against miss critical opportunities to link them with avenues for support. A small but significant group who resist all formal services indicate they are most likely to be assisted in everyday environments that are normal and nonstigmatising, rather than through formal agency settings.     

Divorce and Values Teaching

Classroom teachers routinely face the values crisis of the divorce explosion that has become characteristic of a society that no longer considers marriage and family a sacred trust. Frequently students bring their problems to school with them where they reach out to their teachers for help they often are not able to get elsewhere. More teachers should learn to accommodate the needs of the growing number of children experiencing a values crisis associated with divorce. The first step is for school systems, schools, and teachers to become better prepared to teach human values along with facts and concepts. The second step is for teachers to develop ways to supplement the school counselor's role in working with the children of divorce, a task often requiring a system-wide or school-wide effort. Without such help, however, teachers still can learn to recognize and respond to pleas for help when they occur in the context of a math, science. English, or other course. Often teachers can help by just being willing to listen and to allow a free exchange of ideas within the framework of generally accepted community values and proven counseling theory.     

The Father as an Idea: A Challenge to Kinship Boundaries by Single Mothers

In separating parenthood from partnership, women have created new family forms in which men may be involved but not as traditional fathers. Through in‐depth interviews with single middle‐class women, I compare families created with anonymous donors to those created with known donors. In the former cases, mothers craft imagined fathers as their children become “looking glasses” into the men they will probably never meet. These children must rely on the mothers’ imagination to create a sense of the fathers’ view of them. While known donors are not “dads” either, the mothers help these children imagine positive fathers, often through more concrete, personal knowledge, and these fathers often know the children from a distance. In an interesting manner, although children may be created without men as physically present “dads,” women contextualize the donors that allowed them to become mothers through acknowledging the social ways that blood kinship creates families. They ultimately reaffirm certain kinds of kinship rather than challenge them.     

Girls' Violence: Beyond Dangerous Masculinity

In this article, we review criminological perspectives of girls' violence. To do this, we first look at the 20th-century tendency to view violent girls as being the same as violent boys or as taking up dangerous types of masculinity. Second, we consider the contemporary ways that researchers have tried to move beyond male-centered and masculinized explanations of female violence. Noting potential problems with current perspectives, we argue that researchers need to address the contexts surrounding female offending, which includes understanding the effects and nature of gender, race, and class inequalities and how they (singly and in combination) predict popular representations and treatment of violent girls. We conclude by cautioning contemporary researchers to avoid returning to androcentric perspectives of girls' physical aggression. Not only are such perspectives logically problematic, they are also consequential. In particular, they have facilitated the masculinization and punishment of poor or working-class girls of color who are filling US detention centers and juvenile prisons in ever increasing numbers.     

A historical perspective on the working contributions of children in britain: 1800-1914

This paper considers the work of children and their contribution to modern societies by looking at this from a historical perspective. Children's work today is often characterised as being little and of no consequence, while it is expected that children should enjoy a childhood free from the cares and worries of the adult working population. In this article I show how children's experience of work moved from the 'public' world of the street and workplace outside the home, to one where children's work is centred in the 'private' realm of the home and school. Children were denied the status and benefits associated with receiving a wage and were therefore a role assumed to be dependent upon others and undervalued. It is argued that children's place in society is similarly devalued and their contributions to the reproduction of that society marginalised. Children's activities and contributions are merely represented as being unworthy of any kind of economic, political or legal reward. The subsequent exclusion from social, economic and political reward separates children from the independence normally enjoyed by adults. While not of course condoning the exploitation of children, or even suggesting that children today are not entitled to a time where they are free of the burdens of paid work, I discuss how children's contributions are redefined, undermined and undervalued. I do so by focusing on the experience of the city of Manchester between 1800 and 1914, and the effects of the slow introduction of legislation curbing children's paid work.     

Psychological homelessness; A clinical example

Abstract

In England and Wales nearly 100,000 children are in the care of local authorities. Many of them will have suffered from inadequate, often grossly inadequate, parenting and will consequently be psychologically damaged. Without considerable help they are likely to become extremely disturbed adults, a burden on health, social and prison services, and with little capacity to be parents themselves, thereby repeating the pattern in future generations. But those who control our health and social service resources seem unwilling to look ahead, and the plight of the psychologically homeless child is therefore not seriously addressed. The staff of children's homes are often inexperienced, inadequately trained, given no psychiatric back-up, and paid the pittance which presumably reflects the very low value put on their vital work by society. The intensive psychotherapeutic treatment that, in addition to good enough substitute parenting, could make some lasting impression on the distortions of character typical of the emotionally traumatised child, is available for only a negligible number. The child described below showed the sort of personality disorder commonly found in such children, but was one of the few to receive sufficient help to make some difference to her character and to her future psychiatric health. 100,000 children (D.H.S.S., 1982) are in care in England and Wales, the majority of them in children's homes or foster homes, because they do not have parents capable of providing for their physical or emotional needs.     

Patient violence. Report of 200 incidents

Studies of assaultive behavior in hospital settings are increasing. Results are often contradictory. These variances are dependent upon the type of hospital, the specific setting, and the disciplines involved in the reporting process. Open recognition that violent incidents occur, and the substitution of fact finding for finger pointing, are the first steps toward prevention and management.     

Neighborhood Effects in Temporal Perspective

Theory suggests that neighborhood effects depend not only on where individuals live today, but also on where they lived in the past. Previous research, however, usually measured neighborhood context only once and did not account for length of residence, thereby understating the detrimental effects of long-term neighborhood disadvantage. This study investigates the effects of duration of exposure to disadvantaged neighborhoods on high school graduation. It follows 4,154 children in the PSID, measuring neighborhood context once per year from age 1 to 17. The analysis overcomes the problem of dynamic neighborhood selection by adapting novel methods of causal inference for time-varying treatments. In contrast to previous analyses, these methods do not "control away" the effect of neighborhood context operating indirectly through time-varying characteristics of the family, and thus they capture the full impact of a lifetime of neighborhood disadvantage. We find that sustained exposure to disadvantaged neighborhoods has a severe impact on high school graduation that is considerably larger than effects reported in prior research. Growing up in the most (compared to the least) disadvantaged quintile of neighborhoods is estimated to reduce the probability of graduation from 96% to 76% for black children, and from 95% to 87% for nonblack children.