‘It's awkward stuff’: conversations about sexuality with young children

The purpose of this study was to explore how parents navigate sex‐related concepts with their young children. This study used feminist phenomenological research methods for data gathering and analysis. Social development theory and a positive sexuality framework were also used in the study design. The participants included 13 parents (mothers and fathers) of at least one child aged 3–11 years old. The researchers performed semi‐structured, individual interviews and data analysis included developing themes that illustrated the essence of parent understandings about the phenomenon. Two themes emerged from the data analysis: it's awkward stuff and my parents never talked with me. The findings illustrated the relationship between the parents' perceptions and social development theory and a positive sexuality framework. Feminist analysis revealed gender differences in how mothers and fathers approached sex‐related discussions with their children. Implications for practice, policy and research were included.     

Strength‐Based Narrative Résumé Counseling: Constructing Positive Career Identities From Difficult Employment Histories

The résumé is a fixture within employment counseling, often viewed as a necessary product for securing employment. Résumés can also be a powerful vehicle for facilitating the development of positive career identities. The complex interplay of negative societal narratives with personal narratives can make the development of a positive identity, and the execution of an employment search, difficult for clients who have work histories complicated by personal and economic challenges (e.g., homelessness, intimate partner violence, histories of incarceration). The authors present résumé counseling as an opportunity for clients to develop stories of strength, reveal stories of difficulty, solidify a positive career identity, and rewrite positive future narratives. This article describes the strength‐based narrative approach to résumé and employment counseling, illustrates its application with a hypothetical case, and offers practice recommendations.     

Afghan-Australians: Diasporic Tensions,Homeland Transformations and the “2014 Syndrome”

With the withdrawal of NATO-led troops from Afghanistan pending in 2014, Afghanistan and its sizeable diaspora are facing an ambiguous new beginning. As in Afghanistan itself, the 35,000-strong Afghan community in Australia is negotiating what has been labelled the “2014 Syndrome”—a chronic state of anxiety about Afghanistan's future. Drawing on data from a series of dialogues and consultations held with Afghan-Australians of different ethnicities in Melbourne in 2012 and 2013, this article contextualizes and critically examines the tensions and shared concerns of the Afghan-Australian community in light of the impending withdrawal. Our study shows that the 2014 Syndrome has exacerbated existing tensions over “Afghan” identity in Australia, which has become intertwined with tensions over the status of Hazara asylum seekers and refugees arriving in Australia. Given the widely held belief amongst Afghan-Australians that the 2014 withdrawal will prompt increased flows of asylum seekers from Afghanistan to Australia, this study argues that tensions around identity frame quite different hopes for the future of Afghanistan and the future of the Afghan-Australian community after 2014.     

Nursing homes and the affordable care act: a cease fire in the ongoing struggle over quality reform

Most provisions in the Affordable Care Act that affect nursing homes originated in two earlier attempts at reform, both of which failed multiple times in prior Congressional sessions: the Elder Justice Act and the Nursing Home Transparency and Improvement Act. Both of these earlier efforts focused on improving quality and reducing elder abuse in nursing homes by strengthening oversight and enforcement penalties, expanding staff training, and increasing the information on nursing home quality available to consumers and regulators. Each bill addressed problems that were serious, widespread, and had persisted for years, but each failed to pass on its own. The Affordable Care Act, with its own momentum, became the vehicle for their passage. However, the reasons the bills failed in these earlier efforts suggest implementation challenges now that they have ridden into law on the coattails of the more general effort to reform the health care sector.     

Military Combat Deployments and Substance Use: Review and Future Directions

Iraq and Afghanistan veterans experience extreme stressors and injuries during deployments, witnessing and participating in traumatic events. The military has organized prevention and treatment programs as a result of increasing suicides and posttraumatic stress disorder among troops; however, there is limited research on how to intervene with alcohol misuse and drug use that accompany these problems. This review presents statistics about post-deployment substance use problems and comorbidities, and discusses the military's dual role in 1) enforcing troop readiness with its alcohol and drug policies and resiliency-building programs, and 2) seeking to provide treatment to troops with combat-acquired problems including substance abuse.     

Births that are Later-than-Desired: Correlates and Consequences

Population Research and Policy Review - Prior literature examining women’s evaluations of pregnancy timing has focused on pregnancies that are mistimed (i.e. earlier-than-desired) and...     

The structure of everyday narrative in a city market: An ethnopoetics approach

This paper considers the value of Hymesian ethnopoetics as a means of analysing everyday narrative in conditions of mobility and change. The paper offers an account of the development of ethnopoetics as a means to make visible and valorize narrative in the Native American oral tradition, and as a method of revealing culturally specific relations of form and meaning. Hymes’ ethnopoetic approach viewed narrative structure as a reflection of a cultural tradition of meaning‐making. Hymes’ analysis proposed that traditional narrative was a culturally shaped way of speaking, and analysis of narrative structure could reveal and recreate culture. His orientation rested on an assumption that the culture of a group was more or less stable and fixed. This paper adopts an approach to analysis based on ethnopoetics, representing everyday narrative dramatically, organized not only as lines and verses, but also as scenes and acts. Representation in scenes and acts makes visible the dynamic nature of the narrative. The paper asks whether Hymes’ ground‐breaking work on ethnopoetics still has currency and purchase in 21st‐century conditions of mobility, change, and unpredictability. Analysis of everyday narrative in a city market concludes that, notwithstanding the complexity of notions of ‘culture’ and ‘language’ in such conditions, ethnopoetics can be productively applied to everyday contexts for the analysis of narrative.     

The Wish to Know/The Wish Not to Know: Curiosity and the Primal Scene

ABSTRACT

This article explores the developmental experience of curiosity and how it relates to the primal scene. Bion’s concepts of K and –K, alpha function, and containment are used to think about the wish to know and the wish not to know (or to “titrate” knowing). Clinical vignettes trace the experience of curiosity as it plays out in the analytic relationship, and they illustrate instances when thinking becomes confused and boundaries collapse in response to “too much” information. Curiosity, when worked through, may become an analytic object, a vehicle for intimacy, and a possible third position between K and –K, one that leads the way toward creativity and play.