Life Experiences and Vulnerabilities of Homeless Women: A Comparison of Women Unaccompanied Versus Accompanied by Minor Children, and Correlates with Children's Emotional Distress

The histories and service needs of 2 groups of homeless women, those unaccompanied by minor children (n = 46) and those accompanied by minor children (n = 22), were compared, on the basis of their responses to a biennial survey of homeless people in a midsize city in the southeast United States. Mothers of children aged 2–10 also completed a measure of stress symptoms for their children (n = 20). Irrespective of family status group, problems such as substance abuse, history of mental illness, health problems, chronicity of homelessness, and crime victimization tended to cluster together. The findings also suggest that declining and/or inadequate levels of public benefits, Temporary Assistance to Needy Families, and Medicaid-funded health care in particular, have adversely affected the 2 groups, particularly families with children. The young children in this sample experienced elevated levels of stress, and significant associations were found between children's stress levels and certain risk factors of their mothers. Implications for service delivery are discussed.     

少年儿童不同时期的生理特征及其拳击运动的身体训练

论述了少年儿童拳击运动身体训练的可行性及重要性，分析了少年儿童不同时期的生理特征及与之相适应的拳击运动身体训练方法手段的选择，可为少年儿童拳击运动的科学化训练提供理论依据。     

王安忆小说中的童年意象

童年意象的运用是王安忆小说独树一帜的重要原因."成长中的儿童"是王安忆小说中特有的形象.以儿童形象为象征载体进行文化批判是对童年意象的出色运用.儿童视角的发掘使王安忆的小说取得了"陌生化"的审美效果,也使细节化呈现文本的艺术表达方式与文本的精神内涵完美地结合起来.儿童视角的运用还让作家能以旁观者的眼光看世界,保持了独立、警醒的创作立场.     

Statistical Distributions of Daily Breathing Rates for Narrow Age Groups of Infants and Children

Children may be more susceptible to toxicity from some environmental chemicals than adults. This susceptibility may occur during narrow age periods (windows), which can last from days to years depending on the toxicant. Breathing rates specific to narrow age periods are useful to assess inhalation dose during suspected windows of susceptibility. Because existing breathing rates used in risk assessment are typically for broad age ranges or are based on data not representative of the population, we derived daily breathing rates for narrow age ranges of children designed to be more representative of the current U.S. children's population. These rates were derived using the metabolic conversion method of Layton (1993) and energy intake data adjusted to represent the U.S. population from a relatively recent dietary survey (CSFII 1994–1996, 1998). We calculated conversion factors more specific to children than those previously used. Both nonnormalized (L/day) and normalized (L/kg-day) breathing rates were derived and found comparable to rates derived using energy estimates that are accurate for the individuals sampled but not representative of the population. Estimates of breathing rate variability within a population can be used with stochastic techniques to characterize the range of risk in the population from inhalation exposures. For each age and age-gender group, we present the mean, standard error of the mean, percentiles (50th, 90th, and 95th), geometric mean, standard deviation, 95th percentile, and best-fit parametric models of the breathing rate distributions. The standard errors characterize uncertainty in the parameter estimate, while the percentiles describe the combined interindividual and intra-individual variability of the sampled population. These breathing rates can be used for risk assessment of subchronic and chronic inhalation exposures of narrow age groups of children.     

Consumption Patterns of Chinese Children

In the ten-year period from 1990 to 1999, children's consumption has increased dramatically in proportion to family income. In 85% of urban families, children's average consumption is equal to one third or more of the family's income. Resources are being directed to children's food and dietary supplements, toys, travel, computers and other electronic equipment, and educational resources. Children perceive that they have a significant influence on the family's financial decision-making. Problems related to children's consumption include indulgence in unnecessary or harmful purchases, and conspicuous consumption that cannot be sustained by the family's income. While some child-focused spending is viewed as enriching development, other expenditures may harm the family's economic well-being and foster an overly materialistic outlook among children.     

Valuation of childhood risk reduction: the importance of age, risk preferences, and perspective.

This article explores two problems analysts face in determining how to estimate values for children's health and safety risk reductions. The first addresses the question: Do willingness‐to‐pay estimates for health risk changes differ across children and adults and, if so, how? To answer this question, the article first examines the potential effects of age and risk preferences on willingness to pay. A summary of the literature reporting empirical evidence of differences between willingness to pay for adult health and safety risk reductions and willingness to pay for health and safety risk reductions in children is also provided. The second dimension of the problem is a more fundamental issue: Whose perspective is relevant when valuing children's health effects—society's, children's, adults‐as‐children, or parents'? Each perspective is considered, followed ultimately by the conclusion that adopting a parental perspective through an intrahousehold allocation model seems closest to meeting the needs of the estimation problem at hand. A policy example in which the choice of perspective affects the outcome of a regulatory benefit‐cost analysis rounds out the article and emphasizes the importance of perspective.     

Young helpline callers and difference: exploring gender, ethnicity and sexuality in helpline access and provision

This article, which has its origin in a feasibility study carried out for three youth telephone helplines, focuses on gender, difference and helpline access by young people. During the research process the writers noted that for the three commissioning helplines, as is the case with the majority of other telephone helplines, approximately two‐thirds of callers are female. A helpline for young Muslims where the gender access ratio was 50/50 stood out as being different in this respect. Until recently, literature on gender and help‐seeking has tended towards making a blanket identification of males as experiencing difficulties in negotiating pathways to help. Although this difficulty of males is evident in relation to both help‐seeking and access to helplines, our study suggests that, at least in relation to helpline usage, when we take culture, ethnicity and sexuality into account, the help‐seeking situation may be more nuanced. This has implications in terms of enabling a cross‐section of young people to access helplines as well as with regard to helpline service development.     

江泽民关于选拔和培养优秀中青年干部的辩证思想

江泽民同志于 2 0 0 0年 6月在全国党校工作会议上的讲话 ,充满了实事求是的精神和深刻的辩证思维风格 ,体现了鲜明的时代特色。他对新时期干部德才基本要求所作出的新的规定 ,是对马克思主义人才理论的极大丰富。他提出的“重发现同时重培养”的原则、“使用、培养同一论”以及“德才具体说”、“辩证的台阶、资历观”等 ,是对传统的人才理论的突破和对马克思主义人才学说的丰富和发展     

Creating Stepfamilies: Integrating Children Into the Study of Union Formation

As a result of the growth in out‐of‐wedlock childbearing and union instability, adults contemplating forming a new union are often already parents. This article examines the role of children in stepfamily formation, both coresident and not, using the 2,594 respondents in the National Survey of Families and Households who were not living with a partner in 1987/1988. We consider children of the respondent and of the partner, which allows us to examine the determinants of entering a stepfamily. We found that being a coresident father dramatically increases forming a union with a woman with children. Women’s coresidential children reduce women’s odds of forming unions with men who do not have children and increase them for unions with men who do.     

Threshold decisions: how social workers prioritize referrals of child concern

This paper examines local authority social workers' decision‐making when considering referrals of children, where the concerns are on the margin of child protection procedures. In doing so, it describes the findings of a qualitative research study undertaken in the policy context of attempts to ‘refocus’ social work practice in the late 1990s and early twenty‐first century. Data collection involved interviews with social workers and parents in 23 cases. Conclusions are that referrals were evaluated on the basis of five key factors, specificity, severity, risk, parental accountability and corroboration, the use of which determined whether an initial assessment or an investigation of alleged abuse took place. The analysis builds on previous work in the child protection field, but demonstrates how the application of these factors differs between cases of child concern and cases of child protection. Policy implications concern the complexity of decision‐making in the uncertain context of limited referral information and it is proposed that the simplistic notion of a continuum of abuse is now outdated. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.