Writing aboriginal history

you are what you make yourself to be: the story of a Victorian Aboriginal family 1842-1980, by Phillip Pepper. 144pp., 127 photographs. Melbourne: Hyland House. 1980. $11.95 (paper).     

Nationality and the European union competing identities in the visual design of four European cities 1

In this study, we integrate visual and linguistic research to analyze the relationship between a city's regional, national, transnational, and European identities as the face of four cities depicts it. We explore the cultural identity of Brussels, Luxembourg, Munich, and Dortmund through the study of public signs found in these cities. We examine how the choice of language, layout, typography, accompanying images, and positioning of city signs reflect the tensions involving the change from a national or regional identity to a Pan‐European identity. Our methodology combines an ethnographic approach and neutral observations with interviews of city inhabitants. By combining interpretive analysis with a meta‐discursive approach to how signs are read and perceived, we consider both the production and reception ends of the signs.     

Alternatives to the Stork Fatherhood Fantasies in Donor Insemination Families

Reproductive technology has presented a challenge to families and clinicians alike in making sense of the psychological experience when a child is born with the use of donated sperm or ova. This article addresses one specific aspect of this challenge: father imagos and fantasies for parents, donors, and children in donor insemination families. Pour psychodynamic issues are explored: denial of reality and denial of the Unconscious, the power of die unconscious and the “unthought known,” reversion and resistance to part-object thinking, and paradoxical psychic construction and destruction of the father. In extension of Winnicott's theory dial there is no infant without a mother, the author concludes dial there is no infant without all the parties who make die child and all the parties who raise die child.     

Trajectories of Parenting During Infancy: The Role of Infant Temperament and Marital Adjustment for Mothers and Fathers

Although it is well accepted that parents greatly impact infant development, it is less clear which factors impact change in quantity and quality of parenting across infancy. This longitudinal study (N = 120 families) investigated how infant temperament and marital adjustment related to trajectories of mother and father involvement and sensitivity across infancy using multilevel models. Parental involvement (caregiving and play), infant temperament (surgency, negative affectivity, regulation), and marital adjustment were assessed from questionnaires when the infant was 3, 5, 7, 12, 14, and 20 months of age; parental sensitivity was coded from two episodes of the Still‐Face Paradigm in early infancy (3, 5, and 7 months). On average, mothers showed higher levels of caregiving, play, and sensitivity than fathers. Mother caregiving, play, and sensitivity increased over time. Father caregiving and play also increased over time, whereas sensitivity did not change with age. Happier marriages were related to increased play for both mothers and fathers. Infant surgency was also significantly related to caregiving, play, and sensitivity trajectories for mothers but not fathers. Findings are discussed in relation to parenting roles and family dynamics.     

Girls@Play

This paper reports on findings from a three-year, Canadian federally funded research project entitled “Education, Gender and Gaming” in which we documented the play practices of girls and boys playing console-based games. We show, in particular, how many of the presumptions and assumptions about “girls playing games” simply do not hold over time, or given a particular context. We therefore attempt to show how our research practices and methodologies help to shape what we have thus far taken as “evidence” or “facts” about gender and illustrate how some of those presumptions might not necessarily hold over time or given different contexts.     

Breast feeding,fertility and infant mortality: An analysis of some early German data

Concern about high infant mortality and its suspected connection with the lack of breast-feeding stimulated the collection of statistics about the frequency of breast-feeding in several German states during the late roth and early 20th centuries. Contrary to the assumption that universal and extended breast-feeding is customary among rural agricultural populations, large regional variations existed both in the proportion of children who were breast-fed and in the average duration of the period for which they were breast-fed. An analysis of these data in connection with statistics of infant mortality and marital fertility confirms the association between high infant mortality and the absence of breast-feeding. An hypothesis linking breast-feeding and fertility, however, is not confirmed. Marital fertility appears to be much more closely associated with infant mortality than with breast-feeding.     

What is Most Important: Social Factors, Health Selection, and Adolescent Educational Achievement

This paper explores the relative importance of social factors and health measures in predicting educational achievement in early and late adolescence using population-based administrative data. The sample was made up of 41,943 children born in Manitoba, Canada between 1982 and 1989 and remaining in the province until age 18. Multilevel modeling nests each individual (level 1) within a family (level 2) residing within a neighborhood (level 3). Most important in predicting adolescent achievement were a broad socioeconomic status index (and a narrower measure of household income), being on social assistance, mother’s age at first birth, gender, residential mobility, the presence of ADHD/Conduct disorders, and measures of family functioning (child taken into care or offered protection services and family structure history). Family size, birth order, and newborn characteristics (birthweight, APGAR, gestational age) were statistically significant but of little importance in explaining the outcomes. Both examining regression coefficients and systematically omitting variables showed social factors (often emphasized by epidemiologists) to have markedly greater effects than the combination of health measures (often stressed by economists) in predicting achievement. However, mental health in childhood is identified as among the important predictors. Record linkage across population datasets from health, education, and family services ministries allowed: tracking health and educational attainment at different times in a child’s life, following a large number of cases across childhood, considerable sensitivity testing, controlling for unmeasured family and neighborhood effects, generating an extensive list of predictors, estimating effect sizes, and comparing Manitoba results with those of well-known American studies.     

More Nuanced Universal Services for New Parents: Avoiding Assumptions of Homogeneity

Abstract

Universal services focus on prevention and providing the support to parents that will help them meet the challenges of parenthood and deal with problems before they become entrenched. Many countries now have good universal services available for new families, and significant advances have been made in recent years to recognize the importance of the early years in the optimal development of the child. This article is based on a qualitative study of transition to parenthood. The study explored the experience of 25 first-time mothers in socioeconomically diverse circumstances in New Zealand. Eleven partners of these women also participated. Mothers were interviewed three times, first in late pregnancy, then 3 and 12?months after giving birth. Partners were interviewed once, mid-way through the baby’s first year. The article focuses on how participants experienced service support. It illustrates some of the diverse needs of new parents, and explains ways in which prevention services might become more responsive to parents’ expressed needs. The authors offer a case for stronger interplay between universal services and informal systems of support, and the development of a new generation of universal services that act as enablers of natural support hubs for new families within their own communities.