Children's Identity Research Articles

Charting the Emergence of National Identity in Children in Wales

This multimodal study, set in Wales, demonstrates that children aged nine and ten can clearly define and rationalise their own national identity. It contributes to age related discussions on how children categorise themselves in terms of national identity and the rationale for their choices. The children in the study used single and multiple definitions of national identity and illustrate the increasing plural nature of 21st century Wales. Family, birthplace and residency were identified as factors in shaping their national identity, more so than language, despite the current bilingual policy drive in Wales.

Children, the Main Victims of Ethnic Violence in Myanmar

Human rights are the basic standards that people need to live in dignity. In addition to the rights that are available to all people, there are rights that apply only to children. Children need special rights because of their unique needs; they need additional protection that adults don’t. The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child is an international document that sets out all of the rights that children have – a child is defined in the Convention as any person under the age of 18 (1). Children's rights are the human rights of children with particular attention to the rights of special protection and care afforded to minors (2), including their right to association with both parents, human identity as well as the basic needs for food, universal state-paid education, health care and criminal laws appropriate for the age and development of the child, equal protection of the child's civil rights, and freedom from discrimination on the basis of the child's race, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, religion, disability, color, ethnicity, or other characteristics (3-8).

“Am I a good boy?”: Explicit membership categorization in parent–child interaction

This paper examines moments in which desired categories such as “good boy/girl” are invoked explicitly in parent–child conversations. Guided by Membership Categorization Analysis (MCA) and Conversation Analysis (CA), we describe the sequential contexts of these explicit categorical identities and the interactional practices that parents and children employ to refer to and negotiate them. The data are drawn from a 120-h corpus of audio recordings of parent–child conversations involving two- to five-year-old girls and boys in five Singaporean middle-class families. The findings suggest that children's categorical identities are often mentioned explicitly in assessments, request negotiation, contracts involving a reward, and prayers. Once a category has been introduced by the parent in talk, the child may resist or affiliate with it. There is also evidence that a child can bring up a desired category in ways that reflect how that category has been co-constructed in previous interactions. In light of the findings, we discuss the nature of children's competencies as social members and the potential emergence of competence in talk-in-interaction.

Parents' traces in life: When and how parents are presented in spontaneous life narratives.

Although parents are acknowledged to be a part of their children's personality and narrative identity and to remain important across the life span, narrative personality research has not yet explored the spontaneous presentation of parents in life stories. Therefore, this study examined longitudinally the place given to parents when crafting one's life narrative and how this changes with age. Furthermore, in contrast to prior studies, we focused on spontaneous mentions of parents. We investigated how often parents are mentioned in life narratives of six age groups spanning from age 8 to 69, how the parental relationship is evaluated, whether narrators express understanding of their parents, and whether they respond to parental values. People of all ages dedicated a substantial part of their life narratives to their parents and evaluated their relationship with them in an increasingly differentiated manner. Parents were increasingly perceived as individuals beyond their parental nurturing role. Until late in life, individuals reflect on values and opinions that were transferred to them by their parents. Parents hold a consistent place in life narratives, emphasizing their importance for narrative identity. Results are discussed in terms of lifelong child-parent relationships. Directions for future research are outlined.

Is gender more important and meaningful than race? An analysis of racial and gender identity among Black, White, and mixed-race children.

Social categories shape children's lives in subtle and powerful ways. Although research has assessed children's knowledge of social groups, most prominently race and gender, few studies have examined children's understanding of their own multiple social identities and how they intersect. This paper explores how children evaluate the importance and meaning of their racial and gender identities, and variation in these evaluations based on the child's own age, gender, and race. Participants were 222 Black, White, and Mixed-Race children (girls: n = 136; Mage = 9.94 years). Data were gathered in schools via 1-on-1 semistructured interviews. Analyses focused on specific measures of the importance and meaning of racial and gender identity for children. We found that: (a) children rate gender as a more important identity than race; (b) the meanings children ascribe to gender identity emphasized inequality and group difference whereas the meaning of race emphasized physical appearance and humanism/equality; and (c) children's assessments of importance and meaning varied as a function of child race and gender, but not age. The findings extend research on young children's social identity development and the role of culture and context in children's emerging racial and gender identities. Implications for identity theory and development and intergroup relations are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record

Euro-American Parents’ Socialization for the Multiple Identities of Children Adopted from China

This study examined how 14 Euro-American parents, including 7 fathers and 7 mothers, address challenges associated with the socialization of 17 children adopted from China. The parents discussed successes and challenges related to ethnic and racial socialization for the development of healthy self-concepts and identities in their children. A conventional content analysis of individual qualitative interviews revealed that parents identified 3, interrelated aspects of the children’s identities and engaged in 3 types of activities that demonstrated elements of cultural competence: Supporting the Identity Aspect, Creating Communities, and Addressing Challenges. For their children’s Asian American Heritage, the parents supported the children’s Asian heritage, made connections with other Asian Americans, and helped the children deal with discrimination. For their children’s Adoptive Heritage, the parents communicated openly about the adoption, formed peer groups with other adopted children, and coped with insensitive comments from strangers about the adoption. For the children’s Euro-American Heritage, the parents encouraged development of a strong sense of self, sustained relationships with diverse peers, and worked to minimize tensions between their children’s Asian American and Euro-American heritages. The results revealed areas of strengths and limitations in the parents’ competence for supporting the interrelated aspects of the children’s identities.

Writing and writer identity: the poor relation and the search for voice in ‘personal literacy’

AbstractThe teaching of writing has been a relatively neglected aspect of research in literacy. Cultural and socio‐economic reasons for this are suggested. In addition, teachers often readily acknowledge themselves as readers, but rarely as writers. Without a solid grasp of compositional processes, teachers are perhaps prone to adopt schemes that promote mechanistic writing approaches, which are reinforced by top‐down discourses of literacy. This ‘schooling literacy’ is often at odds with children's lives and their narratives of social being. After discussing theories of writing, tensions between ‘schooling literacy’ and ‘personal literacy’ are debated. It is suggested that the disjuncture of the two exposes gaps that provide teachers with spaces in which to construct a writing curriculum embedded in children's language and funds of knowledge. The elevation of this ‘personal literacy’ is viewed as an imperative to enhance children's identities as writers, as well as their engagement with writing.

Urban Childhoods and Subjectification: Perspectives and Practices of Children on their Way to School

The aim of the article is to reflect theoretically and empirically on the question of how growing up in a city and having an urban childhood is relevant for children's agency and identity. It argues that agency and identity are a product of social and discursive practices that children take part in (e.g. on their way to school and after school). Based on an ethnographic project on urban childhoods in a big city in Germany, the article outlines the framework of this study and describes some findings on the basis of interviews, city walks and observation protocols. The function of the empirical data and analysis is to give an impression of what comes into focus if we reconstruct the entangled (re)production of urban spaces, agency and identity.

The Experiences of Sexual Minority Mothers with Trans* Children

AbstractEight nonheterosexual (i.e., bisexual, lesbian, bi/pansexual) mothers with trans* children between 6 and 11 years of age participated in semistructured interviews in which they discussed the intersections of their own sexual minority identities with their children's gender identities or expressions. Transfamily theory was utilized to understand how heteronormativity and cisnormativity operated in these families' lives. Initial lack of awareness among most of the mothers regarding trans* identities, as well as efforts by some to curb their children's gender expressions, paralleled previous reports on primarily heterosexual parents with trans* children. Having sexual minority identities and experience with LGBTQ communities was beneficial for some mothers but seemingly disadvantageous for others, in that some experienced blame for their children's trans* statuses, often due to the fact that these mothers identified as queer themselves. Findings reveal complexities in how participants were influenced by heteronormativity and cisnormativity and have implications for those looking to learn more about queer parents' experiences raising their trans* children.

CHILDREN’S LITERATURE ABOUT WAR AND THE SHAPING OF CHILDREN’S IDENTITY

This study aims to investigate the representation of men and women in war children literature in Iran and it tends to show how the kind of representation can influence the children's identity shaping. The study, working through critical discourse analysis, examines ten Persian children’s stories (seven short stories and three longer ones) related to the 1980s Iran-Iraq war and published between 2000 and 2007. This study focused on ‘crying’ as an example and detected how crying, which is a unique human trait and essential need for a child to survive and the first sign of life, becomes a discriminatory term for women, and as a means to reinforce the unequal power relation scale with a male at the powerful end and a female at the powerless end. The participation of Iranian women in the stories has been neglected and they are either excluded (mostly) or included in passive roles that emphasize their weeping for the ‘martyrs’. So ignoring women and girls and emphasizing boys' and even very young boys' presence in the war stories for children can be harmful in identity shaping for both boys and girls.

“A Fantasy of Untouchable Fullness”: Melancholia and Resistance to Educational Transformation

AbstractThe progressive language of growth and development that informs our shared ideal of the educated subject also informs the curricular structure of schooling, in which new learning builds upon established knowledge and students' development depends upon their desire to take on those identities associated with various achievements of knowledge. Each re‐creation of the student's identity requires a new production of the student's former identity as an uneducated self — a negative statement of the self‐overcome, fashioned in the language of the curriculum. But what of those objects of attachment or aspects of the child's identity that can neither be integrated in the student's educated identity nor accounted for as a recognizable lost object of childhood? In this essay James Stillwaggon argues that considering the student subject in terms of its melancholic attachments offers some alternatives to thinking of student identity primarily in terms of its progressive learning function. Julia Kristeva's treatment of melancholia as “asymbolia,” or against the representational function of language, is especially significant to this discussion, as it highlights the melancholic's resistance to the most basic educational purpose, namely the further engagement of the subject in language.

A culturally responsive framework for enhancing phonological awareness development in children with speech and language impairment

In this article an example of a culturally responsive approach to working with children with speech–language impairment is discussed. The approach is centered on the premise that early literacy success is critical to these children's academic achievement and that multiple variables will contribute to children's literacy development. The example is novel in that it integrates a science-based model, the Component Model of Reading, with indigenous writings related to indicators for academic success, namely the importance of cultural identity, resilience, a sense of place, bicultural education, and the importance of family. This framework is termed ‘A Braided Rivers Approach' and is used in this article to discuss how speech–language therapists and teachers can advance children's phonological awareness development in ways that maximize the benefits for their early reading and spelling development and that values and respects children's cultural identity and background, particularly for children with speech–language impairment who are at risk of experiencing written language difficulties.

Communication, advocacy, and acceptance among support-seeking parents of transgender youth

ABSTRACTOthers' reactions to transgender youth have been identified as an important area of study. In the current study, support-seeking parents of transgender youth already connected with services (e.g., support groups or specialty clinics) completed questions about disclosure of the child's gender identity to the parent, extended family, and school personnel, and ongoing parent-child communication about the child's gender identity. Results indicated that most children disclosed their gender identity to parents in a face-to-face conversation, often in a gradual process. Parental acceptance of the child's gender identity was common, as was parental advocacy in this sample. Acceptance by school personnel and extended family increased over time but continued to be infrequent. Results indicate that although transgender youth of support-seeking parents may be accepted at home, youth may still face discrimination and hardship in other settings.

A utilização da leitura na pré-escola

A leitura na pré-escola é um momento de despertar o gosto e o prazer em ler, é também uma fonte de reflexão, descobertas e de aprender a ouvir. É necessário então que o contato com a leitura comece desde a pré-escola, com uma diversidade de textos e que o professor também tenha o hábito da leitura em seu cotidiano. Sendo assim, o presente estudo teve como objetivo investigar os benefícios da leitura cotidiana em sala de aula na vida pré-escolar de um aluno, quais as características de um professor leitor e a leitura como formação de identidade da criança. A metodologia utilizada foi uma pesquisa bibliográfica seguida de uma análise realizada através de leitura, comparação de dados e fala de autores. Através das análises bibliográficas percebemos a importância do papel do professor em incentivar o desenvolvimento de uma prática de leitura, que a torne presente no ambiente escolar, a fim de que se promova o hábito e gosto de ler na criança, concluindo que a leitura é a principal influência na formação pessoal e acadêmica, contribuindo com uma diversidade de fatores para a construção da identidade do aluno.

Constructing embodied identity in a ‘new’ ageing population: A qualitative study of the pioneer cohort of childhood liver transplant recipients in the UK

Medical innovations have created a future of survivorship for many groups of people with a variety of conditions that were previously untreatable or untreated. This has led not only to an expansion of medical activity in a whole variety of new areas but also to the emergence of new groups of individuals defined or defining themselves through their experiences, diagnosis and treatment. Through analysis of in-depth interviews with 27 of the now-adult survivors of the pioneer cohort of children receiving liver transplants in Britain in the early 1980s and 1990s, this paper presents how this group not only illustrate the capacities of modern medicine and healthcare to transform the survival prospects of a more diversified population, but also create new narratives of embodied identity. Specifically, we examine how childhood identities were shaped in three settings; home, hospital and school. At home, parents appeared to shape their child's identity through controlling tightly a daily medical regime focused on the concept of ‘body as machine’, celebrating their survival as a transplant recipient, yet at the same time socialising their child as a ‘normal’ child, albeit one who had a serious illness. The hospital appeared instrumental in shaping parents' focus on their child's body, and offered a way, through other patients with liver disease, for children to feel ‘normal’ in their difference. It was in school, through interaction with ‘healthy’ children and teachers, that corporeality and embodiment appeared most salient, and where social identity was negotiated and more often held in contention. Adult survivors of childhood liver transplant straddle the different discourses of normality and difference as their embodied experiences shape their narratives of identity and shed light on an underexplored aspect of the relationship between medicine and society.

Specific Features of Gender Identity Formation in Children from Single-parent and Nuclear Families in Ontogenesis

Abstract This article is devoted to the problem of gender identity formation in children from single-parent and nuclear families in the process of socialization. In contemporary Russia such phenomena as blurred gender roles, destruction of the value of the traditional family, common mastering of professions traditionally associated with the opposite sex have caused distortion of children's understanding of the masculinity – femininity concept. Children from single-parent families find it especially difficult understand the formation of the ideas of masculinity, femininity, female and male roles and the behavioural patterns in society. Children raised in single-parent households can often be characterized by an emotional alienation from the male parent and the formation of a symbiotic relationship with the female parent. The results of our empirical research have shown that teenagers must have close emotionally stable relationships with both the male and female parents in order to develop a harmonious adaptive functional gender identity. However, single parenting does not necessarily cause destructive consequences for a child's identity, and dysfunctional relationships may emerge in a nuclear family, too.

Types of social support and parental acceptance among transfemale youth and their impact on mental health, sexual debut, history of sex work and condomless anal intercourse.

IntroductionTransfemale youth (TFY) are an underserved and understudied population at risk for numerous poor physical and mental health outcomes, most notably HIV. Research suggests that parental acceptance and social support may serve as protective factors against HIV and other risks for TFY; however, it is unclear whether TFY receive primary social support from parents with or without parental acceptance of their gender identity. This study examines differences in parental acceptance, mental health and the HIV risk factors of history of sex work, age at sexual debut and engagement in condomless anal intercourse between TFY with two types of primary social support – non-parental primary social support (NPPSS) and parental primary social support (PPSS).MethodsCross-sectional data collected from 301 TFY from 2012 to 2014 in the San Francisco Bay Area were analyzed to determine differences in parental acceptance, mental health and HIV risk factors between youth with and without PPSS. Univariate statistics and chi-squared tests were conducted to determine if parental acceptance and health outcomes were correlated with type of social support.ResultsTwo-hundred fifty-one participants (83.7%) reported having NPPSS, and 49 (16.3%) reported PPSS. Significantly more youth with PPSS reported affirmative responses on parental acceptance items than their NPPSS counterparts. For example, 87.8% of youth with PPSS reported that their parents believed they could have a happy future as a trans adult, compared with 51.6% of youth with NPPSS (p<0.001). Fewer participants with PPSS reported symptoms of psychological distress (2.0% vs. 12.5%, p=0.057), though this finding was not statistically significant; no significant associations were found between primary social support type and HIV risk factors.ConclusionsThese results suggest that TFY with parental acceptance of their gender identity may be more likely to reach out to their parents as their primary source of social support. Interventions focused on parental acceptance of their child's gender identity may have the most promise for creating parental social support systems in the lives of TFY.

Children's environmental identity and the elementary science classroom

ABSTRACTThis qualitative research explores children's environmental identity by describing how fifth grade children view their relationship with the natural world alongside their experience of elementary school science. Qualitative analysis of in-depth interviews with 17 grade 5 children was supported with a survey that included responses to open-ended survey items. Analyses convey that children recognize and describe their own environmental identity, but that identity is often unacknowledged in the science classroom. This lack of acknowledgment may limit connections of school science to children's interests and emotional attachment to the natural world.

From The Editors

Dear Colleagues, This issue of Reading Research Quarterly includes compelling studies that highlight the impact of language in a variety of ways and across different cultures. Some of the language experiences examined and analyzed are how language can be used to discuss texts, how language can be used to shape a reader's identity, and how challenges in one language can be an indicator of challenges in a second language. Although much is known about how to engage children in rich language practices, there is still controversy over the role that images in books play in promoting it. Aukerman and Chambers Schuldt examine how young students explicitly reference images versus the words during text discussions. This study focuses on the opportunities to cultivate dialogue in whatever modal source they choose. The power of language, specifically labels, is evident in the next article. To provide an alternative lens on how a learning disability may be socially and culturally expressed across generations, Kabuto moves the research out of the school-based context of reading into the context of a single case study of a mother and her child. Kabuto shares how the mother, influenced by her own past reading experiences, described her son's activities differently than the test-based determinants of his teachers. By analyzing assessments and observations, Kabuto focuses on sociocultural-historical factors to form a transgenerational space. She poses critical questions around how we define reading ability and how parents use language and discourses to construct, support, and challenge their children's identities as readers. Kabuto challenges us to think about how school-based labels may communicate a wide range of meanings regarding one's ability and how labels can greatly influence a shared identity for family members. Nielsen adds to the extensive research on orthographic learning in her study of Danish-speaking third graders. She utilizes the self-teaching hypothesis to examine whether explicit instruction on conditional sound–spelling patterns facilitates orthographic learning during independent reading. In addition to the many standardized assessments used to assess students’ word knowledge, Nielsen developed additional assessments to measure print exposure, homophone choices, and nonword choices. She argues that her study provides newer and stronger evidence that “enhanced knowledge of sublexical sound–letter patterns boosts memory for new word spellings” by using distinct word-learning tasks. Shum, Ho, Siegel, and Au provide the results of their longitudinal study investigating whether reading development in two languages with dramatically different orthographies can predict common cognitive abilities. This study focused on Chinese and English biliteracy over a four-year period and sought to fill identified gaps in the research literature. Shum and colleagues argue that early cognitive abilities in Chinese predict higher order literacy skills, such as comprehension, text-level reading, and writing fluency in the second language, English. Basing their work on the central processing hypothesis and Cummins's linguistic interdependence hypothesis, Shum and colleagues present evidence that there are several cross-language markers that may contribute in predicting English reading and writing abilities over time. In the final article, Rodgers, D'Agostino, Harmey, Kelly, and Brownfield accept the challenge posed by van de Pol and colleagues to study instructional scaffolds in a way that analyzes student measures rather than simply the teacher's instructional moves. Rodgers and colleagues developed a five-level system for analyzing instructional contingency, attended to both student and teacher contributions in the interactions, and considered student outcomes. In an effort to gauge teacher effectiveness, the researchers created a National Teacher Effectiveness Index and measured this against a national set of 5,569 Reading Recovery teachers. Taking all of the analyses into account, the authors demonstrate and conclude that the nature of effective scaffolding is as complex as Wood and Middleton first indicated in 1975. Reading Research Quarterly's tradition of presenting rigorous research on timely issues continues with this volume of carefully crafted studies that illuminate the power of language. The articles in this issue provide opportunities for us to explore language from different perspectives and expand our knowledge of literacy, language, and culture. Susan B. Neuman Linda B. Gambrell

L’adoption internationale et sa représentation en littérature de jeunesse pour enfants de 2 à 7 ans

Goals of the studyThe evolution of youth literature shows it addresses more and more diverse societal themes and that it aspires to contribute to the child's socialization and emotional development. The themes of adoption and international adoption in particular are addressed in numerous youth publications, very often aimed at young children. What are the characteristics of this editorial production in regards to the evolution of adoption practices? What are the characteristics of books aimed at young children? What are the themes, the questions raised, the eluded ones? What does that say about our relation to adoption? MethodAfter identifying all of the youth literature production relating to adoption and aimed at children between 2 and 7, we selected 31 books published between 1987 and 2013 that focused particularly on international adoption. We chose 6 themes for content analysis: before the adoption, the adoption trip, the child's development and behavior, the child in his/her environment, the child's identity. Results and conclusionParents and children can find in these books a great variety of themes, addressed with sensitivity and recounting the child's subjective experience. But several aspects of the story of the adoption and its context are generally toned down: the circumstances that led to the adoption, the story of the adopting parents, the integration of the child in a larger environment. To conclude, these books vary from providing scenarios that give support to the reflection, to neutralizing situations of conflicts to protect adopting parents maybe as much as adopted children.