The American Revolutionary Period

The United States is currently experiencing the largest wave of immigration in its history. This contemporary immigration is unprecedented in its diversity of ethnicity, class, and countries of origin, and large urban areas are no longer alone in absorbing arrivals. The author reviews children's picture books about dilemmas that immigrant children face, such as being different, coping with great and small changes, responding to one's name, learning a new language, relating to previous generations and traditions, maintaining ties with distant relatives, and visiting their homelands. Classroom materials relevant to the social and cultural experiences of children generate interest in and enthusiasm about learning. When teachers include books about the negotiation of another culture in the curriculum, children learn through reading that stories can be about people like them, that stories of their experiences are worthy of being in a book, and that other children have felt the way they do.     

Keeping open by re‐imagining laughter and fear

Speaking to the debate on the nature of critique, this article is about the struggle to produce an account when listening to and retelling stories. It begins with the disconcertment over listening to a coherent story that emerges in interviews about the development of performance indicators for Dutch hospital care. The indicators are presented as solutions to the problem of unruliness in the healthcare world. Drawing on Helen Verran's work on generative critique I slow down the ‘problem‐solution‐found’ plot. Instead of contrasting the apparently coherent stories with the complexities of an ‘underlying’ practice of healthcare, I hold on to my initial disconcertment so that ‘fleetingly subtle’ interruptions become entry points for generative critique. Taking Eduardo Viveiros de Castro's understanding of the relation that fear and laughter have to alterity, I show how fear and laughter permit generative critique within seemingly coherent stories. In the case of indicator development, the interviewees ‘laugh away’ what they consider alter from quality and safety in healthcare: having no control over what is going on, polyglotism instead of a common language, and inaction as opposed to taking one's time. Paying attention to disconcerting interruptions generates sensitivity and questions rather than yet another set of (critical) problem‐solution‐found answers. How can ridiculed (laughed away) subjectivity be acknowledged as important entry points for including alterity in supervision? And how to position the acknowledgement, not as an antidote, but as a way of rendering the fear of alterity generative? Nurturing sensitivities is crucial for keeping open, which means resisting both the sticky tendency of normalizing accounts and the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. I conclude that keeping open by re‐imagining critique resonates with the creativity of collective life in actual times and places. Thereby it offers a promising potential for doing worlds differently.     

Participation as a right to the city: Iranian children’s perspectives about their inclusion in urban decision-making

To assess children's willingness to participate in decision-making about urban environments, Iranian children were invited to tell their stories about child inclusion in city affairs. The findings demonstrate children's enthusiasm to have a say, their suggestions of how their ideas can be integrated into planning, and their competency for participation. Despite their willingness, participants indicated awareness of patriarchal cultural views of children and childhood which continue to exclude them from planning involvement. Being denied the exercise of their rights to the city generates a marginalised status, alienating children from achieving appropriate engagement.     

A Weak Embrace: Popular and Scholarly Depictions of Single‐Parent Families, 1900 – 1998

The growth of single‐parent families constitutes one of the most dramatic and most studied social changes of the 20th century. Evolving attitudes toward these families have received less attention. This paper explores depictions of these families in representative samples of popular magazine (N = 474) and social science journal (N = 202) articles. Critical depictions of divorce plummeted between 1900 and 1998, a trend stemming not from any increase in favorable depictions but from the virtual disappearance of normative debate. Such de facto acceptance did not extend to nonmarital childbearing, however, depictions of which were almost as likely to be critical at the century’s end as at its beginning. These trends illustrate Americans’ ambivalent embrace of single‐parent families as a reality but not an ideal.     

Measuring the Development of Social Attention Using Free‐Viewing

How do young children direct their attention to other people in the natural world? Although many studies have examined the perception of faces and of goal‐directed actions, relatively little work has focused on what children will look at in complex and unconstrained viewing environments. To address this question, we showed videos of objects, faces, children playing with toys, and complex social scenes to a large sample of infants and toddlers between 3 and 30 months old. We found systematic developmental changes in what children looked at. When viewing faces alone, younger children looked more at eyes and older children more at mouths, especially when the faces were making expressions or talking. In the more complex videos, older children looked more at hands than younger children, especially when the hands were performing actions. Our results suggest that as children develop they become better able to direct their attention to the parts of complex scenes that are most interesting socially.     

Ukrainian Symbolism and the Problem of Modernism

This article explores the role of children’s literature in the formation of Stalinist identity and assembles a list of moral principles developed in the most popular early works of Arkadii Gaidar. It is not in Marxist texts nor in Pioneer slogans, but in these simple stories that the essential narrative structures of Soviet morality were created. Gaidar’s books are representative of a whole group of Soviet children’s literary classics published in the late 1920s–early 1930s and written by young people whose coming of age coincided with the years of political and social turmoil. This study argues that Gaidar’s own personal experiences as a youthful Red Army commander during the Civil War underpinned the moral vision of these popular novels. A new military-like value system, with courage (not kindness or love) as its central value, originated in Gaidar’s books and moulded several generations of Soviet children.     

2‐Year‐Olds’ Speech Understanding in Multitalker Environments

Infants and toddlers are often spoken to in the presence of background sounds, including speech from other talkers. Prior work has suggested that infants 1 year of age and younger can only recognize speech when it is louder than any distracters in the environment. The present study tests 24‐month‐olds’ ability to understand speech in a multitalker environment. Children were presented with a preferential‐looking task in which a target voice told them to find one of two objects. At the same time, multitalker babble was presented as a distracter, at one of four signal‐to‐noise ratios. Children showed some ability to understand speech and look at the appropriate referent at signal‐to‐noise ratios as low as ?5 dB. These findings suggest that 24‐month‐olds are better able to selectively attend to an interesting voice in the context of competing distracter voices than are younger infants. There were significant correlations between individual children’s performance and their vocabulary size, but only at one of the four noise levels; thus, it does not appear that vocabulary size is the driving factor in children’s listening improvement, although it may be a contributing factor to performance in noisy environments.     

Parenting and the Harry Potter stories: a social care perspective

This paper analyses the capacities of the parents in the Harry Potter stories, written by J. K. Rowling, from a social care perspective. It argues that there is a synergy between what the social sciences have discovered about ‘good enough parenting’ and the insights that can be gathered from entering the imaginative world of literature. This is illustrated by a discussion of the qualities of the parents and parent substitutes in the four books published between 1997 and 2000. It concludes that fictional experiences of childhood create empathy in the reader and enable us to confront the need for imagination as parents and practitioners, while the social sciences keep knowledge grounded and evidenced. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Re‐framing the Analysis: A 3‐dimensional Perspective of Prisoners’ Children's Well‐being

This article highlights three dimensions to understanding children's well‐being during and after parental imprisonment which have not been fully explored in current research. A consideration of ‘time’ reveals the importance of children's past experiences and their anticipated futures. A focus on ‘space’ highlights the impact of new or altered environmental dynamics. A study of ‘agency’ illuminates how children cope within structural, material and social confines which intensify vulnerability and dependency. This integrated perspective reveals important differences in individual children's experiences and commonalities in broader systemic and social constraints on prisoners’ children. The paper analyses data from a prospective longitudinal study of 35 prisoners’ children during and after their (step) father's imprisonment to illustrate the arguments.     

The Heart of the Matter: Exploring Intergenerational Themes in Children’s Literature

Exploring intergenerational themes in children’s literature, this article shares the perspective of one grandfather and the reactions of educators in response to stories of young and old. Four themes found within intergenerational children’s literature are identified: (a) perceptions of grandparents’ interests and personalities, (b) passing down of knowledge, (c) shared moments/adventures, and (d) perceptions of aging. Intended as a reference point for educators as they select books depicting intergenerational themes, a question asked is, What is at the heart of the matter when it comes to children’s literature depicting themes of young and old?     

‘What Troubled Children Need’ Constructions of Everyday Life in Residential Care

This article argues that key values of child protection work are not the appropriate point of departure for contemplating the welfare of children in professional care. Central values, such as ‘comfort’, ‘recognition’ or ‘appreciation’ say very little about the social practices of residential care. Using data from an ethnographic study in Denmark, the article demonstrates that ideas about the needs of troubled children are realised in dissimilar ways, creating highly different living environments for institutionalised children. The principles behind these construction processes are explored, and the profound ambiguity of values in childcare is discussed as an effect of residential care’s being an ‘institutional’ or ‘human service’ type of organisation.     

Beyond the Preschool Years: Children’s Perceptions About Starting Kindergarten

This article describes a research study that investigated three‐ and four‐year‐old Canadian preschool children’s perceptions about starting kindergarten. Findings from 33 focus‐group discussions suggest that children begin to formulate ideas about starting kindergarten prior to school entry. Children’s responses were grouped according to three themes, play versus academic activities and homework; getting bigger but still needing help; and rules. Overall, the responses highlighted their expectations regarding continuity and discontinuity between the two environments. These findings support the position that children should be given the opportunity to contribute to the planning of transition practices.     

A Children's Standpoint: Needs in Out‐of‐Home Care

This article discusses research reported in ‘The Needs of Children in Care’ ( Mason and Gibson, 2004 ) in which children participated in defining their needs in out‐of‐home care. In this study a central research presumption was that children are knowledgeable about their own needs. The methods used to facilitate the involvement in the project of children and adult stakeholders in out‐of‐home care are described. Also described are findings from the research which identified that of prime importance to the children were their connections with others and their agency in their own lives. These findings are compared with findings from the narratives of the adult stakeholder groups. Finally, the implications of the findings, for improving children's participation in decision‐making around their needs in care are considered in the context of broad adult–child social relations in the care system.     

‘Who is in Your Family?’ Italian Children with Non‐heterosexual Parents Talk about Growing Up in a Non‐conventional Household

The paper presents findings from explorative research conducted in Italy with seven 9‐ to 12‐year‐old children with non‐heterosexual parents. The aim was to find out how children describe their family structure, how they talk about their family with peers, and how they experience peers' attitudes towards non‐heterosexual families. Findings show that children have a flexible and inclusive representation of family and they disclose selectively with their peers who don't always consider homosexuality normal and homoparental families ‘real families’. The paper concludes by suggesting that institutional recognition for same‐sex parenting would support children in the everyday work of negotiating diversity.     

Resilience in maltreated children: implications for special needs adoption.

Children in the child welfare system face renewed issues of loss as they enter adoptive placements. Every move is a loss and an exercise for the child in establishing the perception of a "safe" environment. Resilient children who have been abused develop coping skills to adapt to their abusing "unsafe" environments. When these children become part of an adoptive family, these coping skills need to be recognized as providing important cues to the child's world, rather than as challenging behaviors. The author deconstructs the words of resilient children into five themes that can help provide access into the children's world, a fresh viewpoint from which to assess the adopted children's reactive behaviors, and a foundation on which an adoptive relationship can be built.     

THE OTHER "CHILD STUDY": Figuring Children as Consumers in Market Research, 1910s–1990s

This article examines how notions of "the child" were constructed in marketing research literature from the 1910s through the 1990s. Drawing on children's industry trade literature, market reports and books, I argue that children have become increasingly portrayed as individualized, autonomous consumers. Over this time period, the desire for consumer products becomes figured by industry observers and researchers as a mode of children's "self expression.'The analytic isolation of "the child" in the persona of a "consumer" authorizes a new morality for consumption by construing children's desire for goods as preexistent and thus natural.     

Partnership Instability and Child Well‐Being

We use data from three waves of the Fragile Families Study (N= 2,111) to examine the prevalence and effects of mothers’ partnership changes between birth and age 3 on children’s behavior. We find that children born to unmarried and minority parents experience significantly more partnership changes than children born to parents who are married or White. Each transition is associated with a modest increase in behavioral problems, but a significant number of children experience 3 or more transitions. The association between instability and behavior is mediated by maternal stress and lower quality mothering. The findings imply that policies aimed at reducing maternal stress and partnership instability may improve child well‐being.     

Rendering sexism invisible in workplace narratives. A narrative analysis of female entrepreneurs’ stories of not being talked to by men

Entrepreneurism is widely regarded as being one way in which women can sidestep the sexism of male‐dominated institutionalized work environments and enter into a world in which men and women operate on a level playing field. Yet, in a corpus of stories of female entrepreneurs’ experiences, we noted that being ignored by men was a constant theme. Taking a social constructionist and narrative approach to identity, we analyse the gendered identity work that female entrepreneurs do in these stories and we seek to explicate the process through which female entrepreneurs do not evaluate being ignored by men as sexism‐in‐action. Using positioning theory as an analytical tool, we analyse these stories at three different levels: the here‐and‐now interaction between interviewer and storyteller; the there‐and‐then identity work of the characters in the storyworld; and the wider societal Discourses that the storytellers enact, and which are enacted by such identity work. Findings indicate that despite making gendered difference, inferiority and lack of agency relevant, the stories are not evaluated as sexism‐in‐action because the female entrepreneurs enact a postfeminist and neoliberal Discourse of freedom, autonomy and choice, rather than a feminist Discourse of discrimination and sexism.     

No Small Change: Process‐Oriented Play Therapy For Children of Separating Parents

This article looks at a process‐oriented play therapy for children adversely affected by parental separation. Process‐oriented play therapy is a therapeutic method that involves the therapist directly entering the ‘world of play’ with the child, by amplifying various modes of expression and helping underlying meaning to emerge, in order to help children access aspects of their life they feel they have no say in. One particular case has been used as an example, involving ‘Jim’ (pseudonym) and his mother, who attended the play therapy session.     

Towards a ‘virtual’ world: Social isolation and struggles during the COVID‐19 pandemic as single women living alone

This article is a personal reflection of how the current COVID‐19 pandemic affects our working lives and wellbeing, as single female academics who live alone in the UK. We offer a dialogue of our daily lives of being confined at home with lockdown measures extended. In particular, we focus on the experience of, and coping with, isolation and loneliness. Is isolation making us more socially connected? Through ‘virtual’ working and changing learning environments for us as teachers and learners, we explore changes in our working life and subsequent changes in the domestic environment. By capturing our lived experiences, we create an intellectual and safe space to voice our emotional struggles — as ‘invisible’ isolated individuals containing and consuming loneliness on our own. We foster alternative conversations as to how we might engender new perspectives from single female academics to combat social isolation in the workplace.