Tending to the Emotions of Children: Predicting Parental Performance of Emotion Work with Children

Scholars, recognizing emotion work as a type of domestic labor, have examined whether domestic labor theories explain emotion work. Few studies, however, have investigated the predictors of emotion work with children. In this study, the authors examine the usefulness of 3 domestic labor theories (i.e., time availability, relative resources, and gender ideology) in explaining relative emotion work with children. Data are from a random sample of couples with children (N = 96 couples). The results suggest that men's labor force hours are negatively related to men's relative performance of emotion work with children and positively related to women's relative performance. Further, women's traditional gender ideologies are related to increased relative emotion work performance with children for women and decreased relative performance for men. Relative income is also a significant predictor of women's performance of emotion work with children. The authors discuss the implications of the study.     

Relations between youths' community violence exposure and their physical aggression: The protective role of adults

The purpose of this study was to examine whether adults moderated the relations between youths' community violence exposure and subsequent physical aggression. Participants were 2575 middle school students (M_age = 12.3, SD = 1.00; 52% female) in the southeastern U.S. who completed surveys collected in the fall, winter, spring, and summer. The sample was predominantly African American (72%). High adult support was associated with weaker relations between exposure to violence in the fall and aggression in the winter among male adolescents. High adult support was related to weaker relations between victimization in the fall and aggression in the winter among female adolescents. Strategies promoting supportive adult relationships may benefit male adolescents by buffering the adverse impact of community violence exposure.     

A Longitudinal Analysis of Parenting Practices,Couple Satisfaction,and Child Behavior Problems

This longitudinal study examined the relationship between couple relationship satisfaction, parenting practices, parent depression, and child problem behaviors. The study participants (n = 148) were part of a larger experimental study that examined the effectiveness of a brief family-centered intervention, the Family Check-Up model. Regression analysis results indicated that our proposed model accounted for 38% of the variance in child problem behavior at Time 2, with child problem behavior and couple relationship satisfaction at child age 2 years each accounting for a significant portion of the variance in child problem behavior at age 3. Couple relationship satisfaction directly predicted child behavior problems over time. Clinical and research implications are discussed.     

Powerful Social Studies Teaching With Poetry and Primary Sources

Given the current marginalization of the social studies within elementary classrooms it is vital that elementary educators seek integrative techniques that promote the social studies. This article explores one such example of integration taught by the authors within an elementary classroom. The three-day lesson taught to fifth-grade students aimed to teach a justice-oriented conception of citizenship through the use of historical biographies, found poetry, and primary sources. By the end of the third day, the students had used both general literacy practices (e.g. shared reading, visual literacy, close reading) and disciplinary literacy (e.g. sourcing, contextualizing, corroborating), demonstrating that integration can be a powerful means to teach the social studies while also maintaining the integrity of the disciplines.     

Play streets: women,children and the problem of urban traffic, 1930–1970

This article explores women’s participation in campaigns for urban play streets in England c.1930–1970. Concentrating on activities in ‘traditional’ terraced streets, it argues that working-class street sociability was strongly connected to children’s play and that rising levels of traffic were beginning to threaten this before the Second World War, feeding growing anxieties over the high rate of road accidents to children. One response to this from the 1930s was a series of local experiments aimed at separating traffic from children (a radical alternative to the more usual response of keeping children away from traffic) through the creation of ‘play streets’, closed to traffic for much of the day. The idea was taken up by national government and became popular in post-war decades, often due to the efforts of local women to defend the public life of their communities. The growing controversy over the introduction and maintenance of play streets from the 1960s shows women struggling to maintain traditional street sociability against the gathering power of business interests and rising car ownership in the period.     

Increasing Research Capacity in Ontario Child Welfare Organizations: A Unique University–Child Welfare Agency Partnership

The objective of this article is to describe the successes and challenges of a unique knowledge mobilization initiative that was funded through the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. This initiative focused on promoting knowledge mobilization by increasing the capacity of child welfare organizations in Ontario to conduct and use research. Building on existing knowledge mobilization models in Ontario, this initiative brought university-based researchers together with child welfare practitioners to use existing data sets from the Ontario Incidence Studies of Reported Child Abuse and Neglect. Overall, this knowledge mobilization initiative resulted in several positive outcomes. Along with the successes, the research team faced several challenges in implementing this initiative, which are described in detail.     

Substance-exposed newborns: Hospital and child protection responses

Recent federal legislation mandates that newborns identified as prenatally substance-exposed be reported to local child protective agencies. However, the legislation does not outline methods of identifying such newborns. A number of methods of identifying substance-exposed newborns exist, including maternal self-report, urine tests of either mother or newborn, and meconium testing, each with its own benefits and drawbacks. Alcohol poses special challenges, as it is arguably as damaging to newborns as illegal substances, but it is treated differently by the medical profession and by child protective agencies than are illegal substances. There is inconsistency in the reporting by hospitals to child protective agencies, in terms of substances and maternal characteristics. This paper calls for hospitals to develop formal protocols for ascertaining prenatal substance exposure, including establishing objective criteria that both identifies a newborn as substance-exposed and dictates under what circumstances a newborn should be brought to the attention of child protective services. The child protective response is also seemingly inconsistent, and the system should develop appropriate responses for this population of newborns and their families.