Children of Migrants: The Cumulative Impact of Parental Migration on Children’s Education and Health Outcomes in China

Since the end of 1990s, approximately 160 million Chinese rural workers migrated to cities for work. Because of restrictions on migrant access to local health and education systems, many rural children are left behind in home villages to grow up without parental care. This article examines how exposure to cumulative parental migration affects children’s health and education outcomes. Using the Rural-Urban Migration Survey in China (RUMiC) data, we measure the share of children’s lifetime during which parents were away from home. We instrument this measure of parental absence with weather changes in their home villages when parents were aged 16–25, when they were most likely to initiate migration. Results show a sizable adverse effect of exposure to parental migration on the health and education outcomes of children: in particular, boys. We also find that the use of the contemporaneous measure for parental migration in previous studies is likely to underestimate the effect of exposure to parental migration on children’s outcomes.     

The COVID‐19 Pandemic and Families in Japan

This paper, which is authored by members of the Japanese Association of Family Therapy (JAFT), describes the COVID‐19 pandemic in Japan from a family systems perspective. The authors are active members of JAFT and include current and past presidents and officers. We describe the course of the pandemic and the ways in which government policies to mitigate the pandemic have affected Japanese families. Challenges that affect Japanese families include the inability to participate in family and social rituals, prescribed gender roles that specifically affect women, high suicide rates, and prejudice against those who are at risk of spreading the infection. The need to shelter in place has also forced family homes to function as a workplace for parents, classrooms for children, and day care services for frail elders, which has resulted in psychological distress among individuals and conflicts among families. We discuss ways that therapists have worked with Japanese families using online therapy.     

Who’s Afraid of the Beast in the Jamesian Closet?

Building on the Foucauldian insight that sexuality is a discourse and thereby refusing to be chained to the Freudian repressive hypothesis, this article aims to ascertain how the closet is made and how the homosexual comes to be seen in the act of reading the literary text “The Beast in the Jungle,” written by Henry James. It will examine the power relationships between the characters and between the narrator and the reader, surrounding the protagonist’s sexual secret, which is linked to fear.     

环境法的体系理念与法治主义的实质化

1993年制订的日本环境法,其保护对象存在着生活环境以及地球（自然）环境的二元性。本文从“法治主义”与其实质化的学说史出发,首先指出文中的“法治主义”是用于对比德国的“法治国家”与英国的“法支配”的概念,后两者是基于历史演化立足于现实制度而形成的历史性概念。其次,论及“法治国家”在从“形式上”向“实质上”的转换过程中,解释该转换是以确保基本人权的保障为目的,并将两者进行有机联系。再者,概观日本环境法的发展及其体系,环境基本法融合了公害对策立法与自然保护立法,同时环境基本法也是自然环境保护法的上位法。,最后,将其与围绕法治主义的学说史联系起来,透过环境法目的理论这一侧面的论证,谋求生活环境与地球（自然）环境的结合,寻获关于日本环境法政策上的新展望。     

Behavior of Infant Chimpanzees During the Night in the First 4 Months of Life: Smiling and Suckling in Relation to Behavioral State

This article reports the behavior of 3 newborn chimpanzees in the first 4 months of life, reared by their mothers and living in a community of 14 chimpanzees in a semi‐natural enriched environment. We focused on spontaneous activity during the night partly because sleeping behavior constitutes an essential part of the infants' activity. Observation during the night also had the advantage of keeping the influence of the mothers' activity as well as the environmental stimulation constant throughout the observation period. We report several interesting findings. Behavioral states defined through overt features such as open or closed eyes were variable during the night, with the rapid eye movement (REM) and non‐REM sleep patterns alternating much as they do in human infants. Although crying is one of the distinctive behavioral states in the case of human infants, the chimpanzee infants did not cry like humans. Suckling behavior was often accompanied by open eyes until the end of the first 2 months. Thereafter, suckling with the eyes closed became more prominent. Although there were no explicit stimuli, the newborns showed neonatal smiling with the eyes closed during REM sleep periods. However, neonatal smiling disappeared within the first 2 months and was replaced by social smiling with open eyes. Taken together, the results suggest a strong similarity between human infants and chimpanzee infants in terms of developmental changes in spontaneous activities at around 2 months of age.     

CORPORATE RESTRUCTURING:

Recently the term "corporate restructuring' has been used to signify a series of strategies to relieve corporate cost burdens. In the American context, corporate restructuring has been synonymous with widespread layoffs and worker terminations as a prevailing strategy. Japanese and German firms, in contrast, use alternative employment adjustment measures with worker termination used as a last resort. Close examination indicates Japanese corporations exhibit organizing principles based on an elaborate sequence of employment adjustment responses to prolonged recession. Further, this article identifies the institutional relations that permit Japanese firms to resist terminating regular employees as a response to recession. Finally, we contend that societal accounting conventions mediate these institutional configurations and employment adjustments to economic recession. These Japanese organizing principles are not universal but represent a societal accounting scheme sustained by overlapping and crosscutting corporate, government, and social institutions .     

The availability of child care centers,perceived search costs and parental life satisfaction

The supply of formal childcare has expanded in many developed countries. However, there is ambiguity in the theory whether the entry of care providers increases consumers’ surplus in a market with differentiated services, such as childcare. This study empirically investigates how perceived search costs and parental life satisfaction change when actual childcare availability is altered. It exploits the new panel data from Australia on the number of center-based childcare places per 100 children within a household’s residential area. The results show that an increase in the availability of center-based childcare is associated with a decrease in perceived difficulty in finding ‘good quality’ childcare, as well as an increase in mothers’ satisfaction with the amount of free time available. These findings imply that the local availability of center-based childcare has enhanced the subjective well-being of parents.     

Fertility trends in Taiwan: Tradition and change

Fertility rates have been falling In Taiwan for several years. The declines appear to be general throughout the island, and are occurring mainly in the age groups above 50, as would be expected if there are beginnings of family limitation. There are indications that the fertility rates are negatively correlated with indices of modernization In local areas. Several pilot studies indicate a consensus in the population on the desirability of a moderate number of children, the desirability of the Idea of family planning, a positive valuation of such traditional Chinese values as the joint family and support of parents by their children In old age. In one urban area studied, a substantial minority of wives 25–29 years old have used a family planning method already. The “pre-pregnancy health program” of the Provincial Health Department has been quite successful in providing service to interested couples, and among these couples the programme is demonstrably effective in reducing birth rates. Data from the various sources are consistent with the speculation that Taiwanese couples want to use modern family planning methods to maintain elements of the traditional Chinese family in a modern setting.     

Indicators of contraceptive policy for nations at three levels of development

The study is concerned with examining variations in contraceptive policies among 74 nations of the world. Employing quantitative data collected by the United Nations, the national policies for three types of contraceptive devices (birth control pills, condoms and IUDs) were examined for nations at three levels of development. The policies for the three items were found to be highly intercorrelated. Given this fact, a restrictiveness index related to the commercial sale of the three types of contraceptive was constructed. A set of independent variables was then related to this restrictive index employing multivariate analysis. The results differed appreciably for the developed and non-developed nations. For the developed nations restrictiveness was significantly related to the fertility rate and the number of physicians in the society, whereas for the developing nations it was significantly related to the infant mortality rate in the society.