Advocacy for parents and carers involved with children's services: making a difference to working in partnership?

This paper explores findings from the evaluation of a scheme providing direct advocacy to parents where there were concerns about their ability to provide safe care for their children. The evaluation explored the views of service users, social workers and conference chairpersons and found general agreement that the advocacy scheme contributed positively to the process of working in partnership. This is of interest given research findings which suggest that working in partnership is particularly difficult in cases involving child protection issues. However, it is noted that there appears to be little political will to develop advocacy schemes for parents in the UK, and this is of concern given the lack of supports available to them to navigate a complex and often intimidating system.     

‘You Feel Sad?’ Emotion Understanding Mediates Effects of Verbal Ability and Mother–Child Mutuality on Prosocial Behaviors: Findings from 2 Years to 4 Years

Early individual differences in prosocial behaviors are pivotal for children's peer relationships. To investigate the interplay among verbal ability, emotion understanding, and mother–child mutuality as predictors of prosocial behaviors, we observed 102 children at the ages of two, three, and four. All time points included verbal ability and emotion understanding tests and both video‐based and maternal ratings of prosocial behavior. The first two time points also included video‐based ratings of mother–child mutuality. The third time point included teacher ratings of prosocial behavior and an experimental task. Regression analysis demonstrated robust associations between emotion understanding at the age of three and prosocial behavior at the age of four. Path analysis showed that emotion understanding at the age of three mediated associations between verbal ability/mother–child mutuality at the age of two and prosocial behavior at the age of four.     

Subjective poverty equivalence scales for Euro Zone countries

We estimate subjective equivalence scales for the whole Euro Zone as well as its individual constituent countries using the European Income and Living Conditions (SILC) data. Importantly, by using minimum needs income question our approach does not require the specification of a complete social welfare function. Our subjective scales increase consistently with household size and countries with well-developed welfare states (Netherlands, Germany, France, and Belgium) show greater economies of scale than less developed welfare states (Spain, Portugal, and Greece). Our approach also allows us to estimate the marginal cost of a child; we find that for the Eurozone adding the first child is more costly than adding a third adult and that the marginal cost of children declines. Comparing modified OECD and our subjective poverty rates we find that the subjective scales ‘redistribute poverty’ away from larger to smaller households.     

New Parents' Psychological Adjustment and Trajectories of Early Parental Involvement

Trajectories of parental involvement time (engagement and child care) across 3, 6, and 9 months postpartum and associations with parents' own and their partners' psychological adjustment (dysphoria, anxiety, and empathic personal distress) were examined using a sample of dual‐earner couples experiencing first‐time parenthood (N = 182 couples). Using time diary measures that captured intensive parenting moments, hierarchical linear modeling analyses revealed that patterns of associations between psychological adjustment and parental involvement time depended on the parenting domain, aspect of psychological adjustment, and parent gender. Psychological adjustment difficulties tended to bias the 2‐parent system toward a gendered pattern of “mother step in” and “father step out,” as father involvement tended to decrease and mother involvement either remained unchanged or increased in response to their own and their partners' psychological adjustment difficulties. In contrast, few significant effects were found in models using parental involvement to predict psychological adjustment.     

Écrire l’incertitude. Le travail à bord des navires de commerce entre stabilisations,prises de risques et responsabilisations

Because of the many sources of uncertainty and opportunities for separation between sailors and the ship, work on board a merchant ship requires a panoply of tools that contribute to the continuity of activity and the identification of active agents. Writing is one of these instruments. Observation of the ship's different written media reveals the difficulty and, at the same time, the need for this organization to be maintained. They reveal the existence of a particular connection between land and sea, while raising issues of responsibility.     

Child Well‐Being: What Does It Mean?

The notion of child well‐being appears in a large number of publications nowadays. Our review of the literature underlines both the oddly pathogenic approach to child well‐being and the scarcity of papers discussing a still poorly defined notion. Through this review, we identified the recourse to a binary language; from there, we derived five theoretical axes that heed the multidimensional and multilevel nature of well‐being, although for each one, a pole is here predominantly developed. We argue in favour of an override of a one‐dimensional, single‐level, unipolar approach to child well‐being and an exploration of its otherwise underdeveloped positive, hedonic, subjective, spiritual and collective dimensions.     

Representation of Romantic Love in Children's Drawings: Age and Gender Differences

This study was designed to fill our current knowledge gap in children's representation of romantic love. To this end, we used a drawing task: 127 children ages 6 to 10 were asked to draw a person and a person in love. Performing content analysis, we identified seven graphic indicators used by children to depict romantic love in their drawings. As expected, results exhibited age and gender differences. First, older children used a higher number of graphic indicators than younger children. The use of each type of indicator (except for one) varied with age. Second, girls used a higher number of graphic indicators than boys. These gender differences were specific to three graphic indicators. Results are discussed in terms of children's developing representation of romantic love and of the potential impact of their socio‐cultural environment on this representation.     

An examination of the impact of maladaptive coping on the association between stressor type and alcohol use in college

Objective: Examine the impact of maladaptive coping style on the association between source of stress (academic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, environmental) and alcohol use (consumption, heavy episodic drinking, driving under the influence) among college students. Participants: 1,027 college students completed an online survey in April 2014. Methods: To test the mediating effects of maladaptive coping on the association between academic stress and alcohol use variables, indirect effects were examined using the PROCESS analytical framework for SPSS. Results: Maladaptive coping and academic stress were associated with alcohol use outcomes. Moreover, maladaptive coping mediated the relationship between academic stress and two of three alcohol use outcomes (consumption, heavy episodic drinking). Conclusions: Among college students, the association between academic stress and alcohol use may be driven by maladaptive coping. College students may benefit from interventions that seek to improve coping skills, potentially alleviating the burden of academic stress and decreasing problematic alcohol use.