Toward a social relational model of Deaf childhood

This paper advances a social relational model of Deaf childhood as a guiding framework for working with Deaf children in a present-day universal neonatal hearing screening and early intervention context. The authors discuss how Deaf children are contextualized in a medical model discourse, in a social model of Deaf childhood, and in a Deaf culture discourse. A social relational model is then discussed in with reference to a capability approach and to findings from the first author’s study of parents and young children participating in an American Sign Language shared reading program in Ontario, Canada.     

Trying to Comfort the Parent: A Qualitative Study of Children Dealing With Parental Depression

In this article, we look at children’s experiences of parentification in families in which one of the parents is hospitalized for depression. Children (7–14 years old) and their parents were invited for a family interview. Using thematic analysis, we constructed a general framework of 14 children’s experiences, guided by the explorative research question: How do children experience parental depression and how do they experience their own caregiving in the family? The thematic analysis revealed eight themes. One of these themes (trying to comfort the parent) was selected for a microanalysis in one family interview. Our study illustrates the process of overt negotiating of caretaking between parent and child with an underlying moral dilemma and related emotions. The dynamic of children hiding their worry can be seen as an answer to the parent’s expressed wish to not burden her children. These dynamics are situated in ongoing debates in family therapy literature, and some suggestions for therapeutic practice are formulated.     

Mobile Children: Small Captives of Large Structures?

All over Europe more parents are living apart and children increasingly commute between two homes. This article explores children’s mobility. Two questions are raised. First, do children with ‘modern’ (consensual unions) family background, commute more? Second, can mobility between parental homes impinge on children’s everyday welfare? In conclusion, the article discusses whether commuting is solely in the child’s best interest. Could it be argued that children’s welfare is sacrificed for parent’s interests, and even ‘captives’ of a globalised society in need of people ‘lighter on their feet’? The case of Norway is used to illustrate a general developmental pattern.     

Learning Racial Literacy While Navigating White Social Studies

Abstract

How do children develop racial literacy? How do they make sense of and respond to the master narratives of race and racism? What role does elementary social studies education play in children’s racial literacy development? I explored these questions as a parent–researcher, inquiring how my child, an Asian American elementary student, develops racial literacy as she learns U.S. history at school. In the following, I first situate my inquiry within the literature on social studies education from a critical race perspective. Next, I delineate my positionality as a critical race motherscholar and the rationale for studying my own child. Last, I present the findings from my inquiry and discuss its implications for elementary social studies education.     

Deaf Families’ Unique Experiences and Obstacles

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on deaf children of deaf parents who grew up using American Sign Language (ASL) in deaf culture. Deaf children of deaf parents described their unique experiences of struggling with obstacles, including quality of education, low expectations from professionals, unwanted sympathy, mental health therapists’ lack of cultural competency, and not being asked for valuable perspectives or advice. The advice from deaf children of deaf parents is included in the article. By bringing greater attention to this population, mental health, school, and other professionals can increase their awareness of deaf families’ unique needs in their work environment.     

‘Civilising’ Deaf people in Tibet and Inner Mongolia: governing linguistic,ethnic and bodily difference in China

The People’s Republic of China is home to over 20 million d/Deaf and hard-of-hearing people, many among them belonging to ethnic minorities. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in two minority regions, the Tibet Autonomous Region and the Inner Mongolian Autonomous Region, this article comparatively discusses findings on sign language use, education and state welfare policies. The situation in these domains is analysed through the framework of the ‘civilising project’, coined by Harrell, and its impacts on the d/Deaf and hard-of-hearing among ethnic minorities are shown. For instance, through the promotion of Chinese and Chinese Sign Language over and above the use of local sign and written languages as well as through education and the medicalisation of disabilities.     

When digital natives instruct digital immigrants: active guidance of parental media use by children and conflict in the family

Based on the premise that children are active agents who influence their parents’ media use, this study investigated child–parent digital media guidance. Children often introduce new media into the family and influence parents’ media adoption and use. This study also investigated whether this child–parent digital media guidance is associated with media conflicts in the family. A cross-sectional survey was conducted among 187 parent–child dyads in Flanders, Belgium. Paired samples t-tests and multiple linear regression analyses were conducted. The results showed that both children and parents reported that children guide their parents how to use digital media, especially for newer media forms such as smartphones, tablets, and apps. Families where there was more child–parent digital media guidance reported more conflicts about media. These relationships were comparable in the parent and child reports.     

Children’s Mental Health Providers’ Perceptions of Mental Health Literacy Among Parents and Caregivers

Mental health disorders are prevalent among children, yet many do not receive treatment. Parents and caregivers play a vital role in recognizing mental health disorders in children and accessing treatment. But a substantial number of parents lack essential knowledge of children’s mental health disorders, including risk factors, symptom recognition, and treatment options. Little focus has been given to parents in the children’s mental health literacy literature. The purpose of this article is to begin filling that gap by using a survey to describe the perceptions of child and family mental health providers’ perceptions regarding the amount, accuracy, and origin of mental health literacy in the parents of the children they treat. The impact of those perceptions on the work of providers is also explored. Eighty-seven mental health providers completed a survey to assess their perceptions of parent mental health literacy in the area of children’s mental health. Providers perceived parent mental health literacy as low, inaccurate, and inconsistent. In addition, providers indicated that parents rely on informal sources of support, such as friends and family for information about children’s mental health. Implications for social work researchers, practitioners, and the children and families they serve are discussed.     

The Probability of Teenage Parenthood: Parental Predictions and Their Accuracy

Teenage parenthood is an often-discussed topic in family economics since it has been shown to affect many outcomes for the teen, child, and household. Using a nationally representative longitudinal panel of American teenagers and their parents, two questions related to the probability of teenage parenthood are examined. First, how do predictions of this occurrence made by the teenager’s parents vary across the population? Second, how does the accuracy of these predictions vary? The actual prevalence and variance of teenage parenthood are also examined, and the determinants of its occurrence are estimated. Among other results, expectations and their accuracy are found to differ substantially across socioeconomic status and some demographics such as race and religion. The average American parent underestimates the probability their child will become a teen parent by only a small amount, but within certain demographic groups this outcome is considerably underestimated, and in others it is overestimated. These differences help explain the variability in teen parenthood effects, and more broadly, the analysis serves as a test of parents’ ability to judge their childrens’ future outcomes.     

The Abused and Neglected Foster Child: Determinants of Emotional Conflict and Oppositional Behavior

Behavioral and emotional problems have been observed in emotionally vulnerable children in foster care under certain circumstances. A common pattern involves the unpredictable appearance of a previously absent or unavailable natural parent. Such an occurrence precipitates the reawakening of the child’s ambivalent feelings toward both natural and foster parents as well as their fears of abandonment. This frequently leads to behavior that is oppositional and difficult to manage. If the foster parents find the child’s behavior unmanageable, and if they are not provided with appropriate professional support during this difficult period, a crisis often follows that precipitates the child’s removal from the foster home. Individual, familial, and systemic contributions to this dilemma are discussed" This article emphasizes the origins and nature of the intrapsychic dilemma faced by these children. Particular emphasis is placed on the manifestations of a conflict of loyalty, in the child, and its relationship to the oppositional behavior of these children in foster care. Additional considerations include the impact of inconsistent parenting, abuse and neglect by the natural parents, the assumption of a parental role by the child and a concomitant renunciation of the child’s dependency needs, as well as an examination of the role of the foster parent’s fantasy of what it will be like to parent a traumatized child.     

Social insurance and children: The relationship between Social Security,economic well-being,and family context among child recipients

The relationship between social insurance, which provides families protection against certain risks, and child economic security is understudied. Using the 2004 Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) matched to Social Security Administration benefit records, this article investigates the economic welfare effects of the child component of the US Social Security program. We examine how the poverty rate of child beneficiaries would change, absent Social Security income, and how heavily the family incomes of these children rely on it, by family characteristics. Our findings reveal that Social Security plays an important role in mitigating economic insecurity among children deprived of a wage-earning parent through disability, death, or retirement. Family structure, earnings, and employment status are identified as key factors moderating the effect of Social Security on child recipients’ financial circumstance.     

Not Always ‘Left-Behind’: Indonesian Adolescent Women Negotiating Transnational Mobility,Filial Piety and Care

In contrast to current research focusing on how migrant parents provide care for their ‘left-behind’ children, this article highlights how Indonesian adolescent women also migrate (or stay) in order to provide care for their families. Drawing from ethnographic research conducted mainly between 2014 and 2015 in Central Javanese migrant-origin villages, this article discusses how opportunities for transnational labour migration affect young unmarried women’s roles as ‘dutiful daughters’ in diverse ways. By analysing how the (im)mobilities of three young women are mutually shaped by diverse expectations to care for their families, I highlight that care is always relational, showing that the distinction between care-givers and care-receivers is less evident than currently assumed in migration studies. Closer examination of how young persons mutually negotiate mobility and parent–child care expectations brings into focus the new forms of agency, power and vulnerability that they encounter in migration and migrant-origin contexts.     

Parent loss and childhood bereavement: some theoretical considerations

This paper attempts to review critically the major psychoanalytic positions on the impact of parent loss during childhood. An effort is made to review systematically the issues of the loss of a parent as a love object, the loss of a parent as a narcissistic injury, children's cognitive understanding of death, and the relationship between loss and trauma. Two questions are raised by our efforts to understand the impact of the loss of a parent through death on children under ten years of age. First, what psychological tasks do children confront and what modes of coping do they use to deal with such an event? And, second, does such an event invariably lead to some pathological result for the child, or may its effects be normalized in the course of time? Although these questions may be seen as empirical questions needing to be answered through the collection of data that would confirm or negate the hypotheses generated, the questions are always posed within the context of a theoretical framework that colors how data is collected and which data is collected. By reviewing the theoretical positions, we come to the conclusion that no single approach is sufficient to explain the complexity of the impact of the death of a parent on a child. We propose that since no integrated conceptual framework presently encompasses all that needs to be explained, it is necessary to use a multivariant approach. Such an approach may be helpful in generating hypotheses and in beginning the task of systematic data collection.     

Can we talk about the right to healthcare without language? A critique of key international human rights law,drawing on the experiences of a Deaf woman in Cape Town,South Africa

A case study in Cape Town, South Africa, explores the right to health for signing Deaf ¹ 1. By Deaf (capitalised) we understand those permanently sensorily disabled people who are born deaf or who become deaf as children and whose first language is sign – South African Sign Language (SASL) in this country. View all notes patients attending health services and who are unable to communicate in a language they understand. It argues that, without language, Deaf South Africans’ dignity and right to health is violated, resulting in serious consequences such as incorrect diagnosis, improper treatment and standard of care not being applied. It critiques the provisions of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) and the limits of General Comment 14 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. The paper demonstrates that Deaf patients do not have informational access to healthcare. It argues that language via professional interpreter services is essential to their South African constitutional right of access to healthcare. General Comment 14 addresses informational accessibility, but this is insufficient without addressing language as a pre-requisite. The CRPD imposes on the South African government human rights obligations to provide professional interpreter services for Deaf people, but unfortunately it allows a loophole by enabling cost to serve as reasonable grounds to defer action.     

Negotiating Languages in Immigrant Families

This study is about the multifaceted nature of language use in immigrant families. Following earlier explorations of language in the segmented assimilation framework and using adolescent and parental data from the 1995 wave of the Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Study, this article examines how adolescents’ use of English with their parents relates to their proficiency in English and ethnic languages, and their personal language preferences, as well as their parents’ language proficiency and use. The findings suggested that adolescent language choice in child–parent interactions reflected the family’s ways to negotiate the distinct linguistic repertoires of immigrant parents and their children. The adolescent use of English was not necessarily associated with social and emotional estrangement between generations. Even when adolescents generally preferred English, they were less likely to use English in child–parent interactions if their parents, particularly their mothers, were less proficient in English. On the other hand, adolescents were more likely to speak English to their parents if their mothers were proficient in English, regardless of what language parents used with the children. Parents who spoke to their children in English likely responded to their children’s doubts about their ethnic language proficiency and were linguistically and emotionally ready to make that transition.     

Do you reward and punish in the way you think others expect you to?

This paper addresses three questions: (1) When deciding on whether to reward or punish someone, how does how you think others expect you to behave affect your decision? (2) Does it depend upon whether others expect you to reward them vs. punish them? (3) What is the interpretation of such a causal effect? We investigate these questions using a modification of the lost wallet trust game (a simplified version of the trust game) that permits punishment. Like previous studies, we collect data on what second-movers think that first-movers expect them to do by directly eliciting the second-movers’ expectations. Unlike previous studies, we ensure exogeneity of these expectations by instrumenting for them. The instrument is the expectations of neutral observers which are disclosed to second-movers prior to the elicitation of second-movers’ expectations. We find that what you think others expect you to do has a zero causal effect on both reward and punishment decisions. We also find that it is important to instrument for second-order expectations because they are endogenous. We interpret these findings in terms of models of guilt-aversion and intentional reciprocity.     

Expectations,education, and opportunity

Using a long panel of youths, we establish a causal link between parental expectations regarding education and educational attainment. In particular, we use an instrumental variables approach to find that the child’s chances of obtaining a high school or college degree are increasing in the parent’s expectations of the likelihood of these events. We then use differences between the objective likelihood of a child’s educational attainment and the parents’ subjective probabilities to consider the hypothesis that lower educational outcomes among certain groups are driven by a “culture of despair,” where children are low-achieving because they are expected to underachieve. While we do find that children from households with lower levels of income, wealth, and parental education are less likely to attain high school and college degrees, we reject the hypothesis that this is driven by low subjective expectations of educational success. Rather, we find that parents from disadvantaged groups have expectations for the educational outcomes of their children that differ more from the statistical likelihood of these outcomes than do parents of children from advantaged households. That is, we find that parents in more disadvantaged households are more optimistic about the educational outcomes of their children than those from more advantaged households.     

Cross-cultural Misinformation: What does special education say about Deaf people

Special education is involved in a large scale attempt to 'educate' regular classroom teachers in addition to teachers traditionally served by special education. This paper examines the information presented in special education text books to determine how issues surrounding deaf persons are presented. Chapters addressing the Deaf in 13 special education text books were reviewed. The content of each chapter was examined to determine if a pathological view (the ear as an organism that needs to be fixed) or a cultural view (the Deaf as functioning members of society, with a legitimate language, American Sign Language, and a fully founded social structure) was the underlying theme. The majority of the chapters focused on the perspective that correction and cure are more important than positive functioning and respect for language and culture. These chapters suggest that not only is there no input from the Deaf community, but there is a systematic avoidance to include Deaf viewpoints.     

Time for work,commuting, and parenting? Commuting parents' involvement with their children

For most Australian parents, there is continuing tension between work and family commitments. This tension is exacerbated by the need not only to have sufficient time available to children in the family but also for that time to be characterized by nurturance and guidance. This article reports on a qualitative study that explored how 21 part-time or full-time working parents, who also commute 10–15 hours a week to work, manage both the quantity and quality of their time with their young children (0–5 years). The study revealed the difficult conditions of commuting and the importance of social support to parents' well-being, as well as a significant pattern of parent–child interaction which we have described as ‘attentive parenting.’ Parents felt these activities contributed to the parent–child bond and their children's well-being in spite of an acknowledged lack of interactive time.