Family Emotional Processes and Adolescents' Adjustment

This study examined associations between parents' emotion coaching and emotional expressiveness, and adolescents' internalizing and externalizing symptoms. The sample included 131 16‐year‐olds and their mothers and fathers. Adolescents completed an open‐ended interview about their parents' emotion coaching. Adolescents rated parents' negative emotional expressiveness, and parents and adolescents reported on adolescents' adjustment. Results indicated that mothers were more accepting and supportive of their children's expression of negative emotions than were fathers. Parents' coaching of emotions was associated with fewer adolescents' internalizing symptoms and was unrelated to their externalizing symptoms. Parents' negative emotional expressiveness was positively linked to adolescents' internalizing and externalizing symptoms. Parents' emotion coaching and negative emotional expressiveness explained unique variance in adolescents' internalizing symptoms. Results highlight the importance of the family's emotional climate for adolescents' well‐being.     

Family-centered care: a resource for social work in end-of-life and palliative care

Recent trends in medicine reflect an attempt to be more patient-centered and while this is progress from the disease- or provider- focused model familiar in healthcare, the experiences and contributions of family as caregivers continue to be overlooked in some settings. The family-centered care model, developed most notably in pediatrics, but emerging in HIV, cancer, and aging, is presented as a resource to increase family involvement at the end of life. In this paper, family-centered care is defined, caregiving trends including support needs of formal and informal caregivers are discussed, and barriers to family-centered services are identified. Reintroducing family into the focus of care at the end of life is the primary goal of this paper. The family- centered model of care offers an appropriate framework for understanding the value of family in end-of-life care and fits well with social work perspectives that understand individuals in the context of their family system and greater environment.     

Identifying factors for poorer educational outcomes that may be exacerbated by COVID-19: A systematic review focussing on at-risk school children and adolescents

School closures across Australia in response to COVID-19 have persisted since 2020, with rising mental health problems in children and adolescents, alongside rising negative family health and socioeconomic outcomes. Further, some children and young people who were already experiencing disadvantage pre-pandemic may be at heightened risk of poorer educational outcomes. Therefore, the aim of this study was to conduct a systematic review of the literature to identify the factors for poorer educational outcomes that may be exacerbated by COVID-19 amongst disadvantaged school students. Key development stages of disadvantage were identified: young children who started school behind, older students already at risk of disengagement from school and children and young people who have had contact with the child protection system. Five databases were systematically searched, across two search periods. A total of 69 Australian, peer-reviewed articles, published in 2005–2021, examining risk factors for poor educational outcomes for children attending school met the inclusion criteria and were included in final analyses. Our findings provide evidence of key risk factors that make these populations susceptible to worsening outcomes resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic, and of the critical importance of ongoing research to guide policy and practice support for these at-risk groups.     

Infant motor development predicts the dynamics of movement during sleep

The characteristics of infant sleep change over the first year. Generally, infants wake and move less at night as they grow older. However, acquisition of new motor skills leads to temporary increases in night waking and movement at night. Indeed, sleep-dependent movement at night is important for sensorimotor development. Nevertheless, little is known about how movement during sleep changes as infants accrue locomotor experience. The current study investigated whether infant sleep and movement during sleep were predicted by infants' walking experience. Seventy-eight infants wore an actigraph to measure physical activity during sleep. Parents reported when their infants first walked across a room >10 feet without stopping or falling. Infants in the midst of walking skill acquisition had worse sleep than an age-group estimate. Infants with more walk experience had more temporally sporadic movement during sleep and a steeper hourly increase in physical activity over the course of the night. Ongoing motor skill consolidation changes the characteristics of movement during sleep and may alter sleep state-dependent memory consolidation. We propose a model whereby changes in gross motor activity during night sleep reflect movement-dependent consolidation.     

A Hierarchical Production Planning and Scheduling Model

A hierarchical production planning and scheduling system is developed that integrates planning decisions into a unified and consistent framework. A three-tiered approach is used to address long-term inventory control, short-term production planning, and daily scheduling tasks. A product grouping scheme introduces uniformity into the solution process and simplifies overall model complexity. Results of the model implementation are reported.     

Public policy towards immigrants in poland’s shrinking cities – The case study of the city of Lomza

Some regions and cities in Poland face challenges due to an accelerating depopulation. Simultaneously, Poland is host to more than 2 million immigrants who mitigate the negative consequences of the population outflow and ageing. While bigger Polish cities adopted particular local strategies and measures addressed to migrants, the situation of smaller cities and towns, especially the shrinking ones, has not yet been explored. Therefore, we took a closer look at Lomza, a downscaled middle-sized city in the east of Poland where two phenomena occur: the accelerating depopulation caused mainly by the outflow of its residents and an inflow of foreign migrants, both asylum seekers predominantly coming from Russia (Chechnya) and economic migrants mainly from Ukraine. We explored the state of the public policy towards immigrants in Lomza in order to see what a shrinking city can offer its newcomers when it cannot count on national strategy in this regard.