Children's Bureau Research Articles

Project Jump: Young People's Perspectives on a Sexual Health Drama Project for Hard to Reach Young People

This article explores the qualitative process findings from an evaluation of Project Jump — a sexual health drama project for hard to reach young people. Project Jump aimed to enable young people to consider their sexual behaviour and its impact and consequence on other people and themselves. The research aimed to capture the experiences and perceptions of young people's involvement in the project, particularly in relation to the use of drama as a medium for learning. Findings from young people demonstrate that drama can offer an important alternative to traditional health promotion in that young people articulated positive aspects of their involvement. These included enthusiastic participation, empowerment and sexual health skills acquisition. In addition, critical areas for consideration for policy‐makers and practitioners in employing a drama‐based approach particularly in relation to effective identification, engagement and ongoing follow‐up activity with vulnerable groups are highlighted. © 2006 University of the West of England. Journal compilation © 2006 National Children's Bureau.

Parents’ Perceptions of Services for Young Children with Faltering Growth

This article reports on a qualitative study exploring the experiences of parents of young children with faltering growth and feeding difficulties. They were interviewed as part of an evaluation of two projects using a behavioural model to resolve persistent feeding problems. The 22 respondents provided valuable insights into their experiences of parenting such children and of the various services they had received. One important finding was the extent to which they found input by some professionals unhelpful. It concludes by suggesting how workers in this field might better support parents, using the principles of partnership combined with behavioural techniques. © 2006 The Author(s). Journal compilation © 2006 National Children's Bureau

The National Quality Improvement Center on the Privatization of Child Welfare Services: A Program Description

Quality improvement centers were created by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' Children's Bureau beginning in 2001 to promote knowledge development through an innovative approach to applied collaborative research in child welfare. The National Quality Improvement Center on the Privatization of Child Welfare Services was funded to assess the current status of privatization, conduct a knowledge gaps analysis, fund and conduct cross-site evaluation of research and demonstration projects, promote the expansion of the evidence base, and facilitate ongoing dialogue among child welfare administrators, policy makers, researchers, and practitioners regarding public/private partnership in-service provision. The article discusses the impetus and empirical foundation for the creation of the center, provides an overview of the purpose and approach being taken, and describes its knowledge development initiatives. Additionally, a brief contextual history of child welfare privatization is provided, along with key content findings from the recently completed needs assessment.

The Correctional Experiences of Youth in Adult and Juvenile Prisons

This article analyzes data from interviews with inmates to examine the correctional experiences of young men incarcerated through criminal (adult) courts in a large Northeastern state. The sample (N = 95) includes respondents from five correctional institutions; some of these inmates have been sentenced to adult department of corrections facilities, and some to juvenile facilities operated by the state's children's services bureau. Relative to the adult facilities, the juvenile facilities are smaller, have much lower inmate‐to‐staff ratios, and they place greater emphasis (in their official guidelines) on treatment, counseling, education, and mentoring of inmates. As a result, one might expect juvenile‐facility inmates to report a relatively more supportive, mentoring‐focused style of staff–inmate interactions than adult‐facility inmates. Yet surprisingly, inmates in adult facilities report better access to education and treatment/counseling services offered in their facilities.

Government and NCB work towards improving quality

The government has joined forces with the National Children's Bureau to launch a project aimed at improving the quality of early years provision.

A Historically Based Thought Experiment: Meeting New Challenges For Children’s Health And Well-Being

In fall 2004 we proposed a way to use the lessons of the past to inform U.S. children's health policy, given the increasingly critical needs of children in this country. Continuing in that tradition and beyond, we describe here the founding and early work of the Children's Bureau and consider how it might be a model for the near future. We propose the creation of a Department of Children's Affairs (DoCA), which would unite the various federal agency-level initiatives aimed at children's health and well-being, much as the Department of Homeland Security did for terrorism defense activities after 9/11.

KRISTE LINDENMEYER. The Greatest Generation Grows Up: American Childhood in the 1930s. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee. 2005. Pp. xiii, 304. $27.50

In this book, Kriste Lindenmeyer surveys a broader cohort of Depression youth than any previous historian. Probing the Depression's impact on infants, toddlers, children in the primary and secondary grades, dropouts, transients, the ill, youth on the farm, in school, and in work ranging from the street trades to the mills, she then turns the question around and asks how the responses of young people helped recast their social identities and roles. Writing with exceptional clarity, she maintains that government and children together in “the 1930s established the legal and cultural infrastructure for the ideal of American childhood that proliferated in the postwar years” (p. 5). Decorated with individual stories and dramatic anecdotes, hers is the most accessible survey yet of a sprawling generation conventionally studied only in its constituent parts. The definitions of 1930s social activists and political leaders and the methodologies of historians were responsible for the analytical partitioning of children and youth from which Lindenmeyer deviates. When reformers spoke or wrote of “the youth problem,” they meant the quandaries of Americans aged eighteen to twenty-five. When they targeted children in the primary and secondary grades, they looked to the Children's Bureau or state legislatures. They hoped that the New Deal for the adult unemployed would somehow provide unintended benefits for children and youth. It did, Lindenmeyer shows, in passages that become a major subtext of the book. Historians, respectful of their own professional obligation to understand the perspectives of the past and accustomed to writing separate monographs about the Civil Conservation Corps, National Youth Agency, Children's Bureau and the like, generally adopted the same tact of studying children and youth in isolation from one another. Taking down the partitions, Lindenmeyer convincingly argues that our age's definition of the entire group of young people (from birth to young adulthood) as a protected class whose most appropriate place was in school originated during the Depression. If Lindenmeyer's modern holistic approach occasionally also leads her to somewhat unfairly measure the New Deal against such values of the present as full gender equality, the benefits seem to substantially outweigh the costs.

KinNET

The KinNET project came into existence because of the need to support a growing number of grandparents and other relatives providing care for children within the foster care system. It was a demonstration project funded by the Children's Bureau designed to create a national network of support groups for older relatives-mostly grandparents-caring for children in and associated with the foster care system. Grandparents and other relatives are an invaluable resource to the child welfare system. However, these caregivers are also an overburdened population that needs creative and supportive interventions to enhance their capacity to provide quality care and reduce the risks to the children. In this intervention the support group approach was tested (a replication of the Brookdale Foundation model with project management from Generations United). Support groups often provide kinship caregivers with access to important emotional and community support, information and referral, relaxation, and respite. This article briefly describes the project, a profile of the caregivers (n = 102) and the children in their care (n = 226), and highlights from the survey data. In addition, we discuss the three key lessons learned from the project and make recommendations to better serve this population. doi:10.1300/J045v22n03_14.

American Studies and Childhood Studies: Lessons from Consumer Culture

American Studies and Childhood Studies:Lessons from Consumer Culture Julia L. Mickenberg (bio) Babes in Tomorrowland: Walt Disney and the Making of the American Child, 1930-1960. By Nicholas Sammond. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005. 472 pages. $89.95 (cloth). $24.94 (paper). The Commodification of Childhood: The Children's Clothing Industry and the Rise of the Child Consumer. By Daniel Thomas Cook. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004. 211 pages. $74.95 (cloth). $21.95 (paper). Raising Consumers: Children and the American Mass Market in the Early Twentieth Century. By Lisa Jacobson. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. 320 pages. $37.00 (cloth). $24.00 (paper). Why is the field of childhood studies relevant to American studies? As R. Gordon Kelly pointed out in a seminal American Quarterly essay in 1974, studying childhood and the culture surrounding it provides crucial insights into core values and practices of our society, revealing how American culture reproduces itself in the younger generation.1 Classic inquiries into "American character" recognized this basic fact: anthropologist Margaret Mead, for instance, observed in 1942 that "just as one way of understanding a machine is to understand how it is made, so one way of understanding the typical character structure of a culture is to follow step by step the way in which it is built into the growing child."2 Scholars of certain historical eras—perhaps most notably the post–World War II period—have paid special attention to children as "barometer[s] of American life" (to use Richard Pells's formulation), but only relatively recently have works with children as their focus begun to gain the sustained attention of American studies scholars.3 However, a strain of exciting scholarship by people such as Karin Calvert, Katharine Capshaw Smith, Gary Cross, Paula Fass, Miriam Forman-Brunell, Sherrie Inness, Henry Jenkins, Kenneth Kidd, Lynne Vallone, and others, in what has come to be called "childhood studies" should be of interest to all scholars of American studies.4 [End Page 1217] The three books reviewed here implicitly or explicitly suggest that we cannot understand consumer culture as a defining feature of twentieth-century America without examining its development in relation to children and childhood. Yet even as Americans increasingly define themselves by the goods they buy, own, and consume, we often view children as somehow apart—or ideally apart—from the crass realm of commerce. As Daniel Cook notes in the introduction to The Commodification of Childhood, "in various ways . . . childhood stands apart from the market even as children are born, live, and grow in tandem with commercial culture" (7). The irony of this false separation is compounded by the fact that "bad" consumption tends to be corrected not by limiting consumption, but by introducing "beneficial" consumer goods. As one nursery school educator argued in the 1920s, "[if] our stimulation is to compete with Satan's . . . we must provide legitimate thrills."5 These three books argue that the tension between consumerism and childhood in the modern era was not simply reconciled but actually employed in service of their mutual development.6 Growing emphasis on providing edifying activity, entertainment, and goods for children marked not simply a new relationship between children and consumer culture but also crucial transformations in both phenomena at the beginning of the twentieth century. During the same period that the United States underwent a profound shift from a production-oriented economy to a consumer-oriented economy, childhood was likewise redefined. As the nation shifted from its agricultural roots to an urban, bureaucratized economy, the child, removed from the labor force, was sacralized: valued for sentimental rather than instrumental reasons.7 This "priceless" child was also increasingly studied, codified, regulated, and protected through the new fields of pediatrics and child psychology, new agencies devoted to child welfare such as the Children's Bureau (established in 1912), and the rise of compulsory schooling, child study programs, and "scientific" regimes of parenting. All of these new patterns of study and regulation shifted public attention away from the immigrant/working-class child in need of "saving" and toward the "normal" child whose development parents would want to emulate in their own offspring, and whom advertisers would...

What Works in Strategic Partnerships for Children: a Research Review

Strategic partnerships have a key role to play in delivering the government's ‘Every Child Matters’ agenda. There is a developing body of research and other evidence and practice‐informed literature about what works in relation to partnership working. Drawing on a research review commissioned by Barnardos on strategic partnership working for children, this study summarises research findings from a number of sectors relating to the development, delivery and review of effective partnerships. Although there is widespread consensus within the research on the factors contributing to effective partnership processes, there is, currently, relatively little evidence that partnerships lead to positive outcomes for children and young people. © 2006 The Author(s). Journal compilation © National Children's Bureau.

Towards Extended Schools? How Education and Other Professionals Understand Community‐Oriented Schooling

The government in England is proposing that every school should offer extended services to children, families and communities. However, in the absence of agreed models of how such community‐oriented schooling should operate, its form will depend on how it is understood by the education professionals and their partners in other agencies who have to make it work in practice. This article draws on data from interviews with over 350 professionals to outline two such understandings. It suggests that they rest on different assumptions about fundamental social and educational issues and argues for a more open debate around these issues. Copyright © 2006 The Author(s). Journal compilation © National Children's Bureau.

Teenagers as Victims in the Press

Research into press reporting on young people has tended to concentrate on young people as offenders. In contrast, this article focuses on press coverage of teenagers as victims. Reports in two Swedish newspapers (a morning broadsheet and an evening tabloid) were studied over a period of four months and subjected to a qualitative analysis of discourse on teenagers as victims of various forms of violence and ill‐treatment. It was found that danger and threats to the teenagers were seen as gendered, and as emanating from their own age group and from outside the home and family. The class background of the victims was not salient and child welfare issues were seldom mentioned. Copyright © 2006 The Author(s). Journal compilation © National Children's Bureau.

Joined‐Up Services for Young Children and Their Families: Papering Over the Cracks or Re‐Constructing the Foundations?

The idea that services can be provided for young children within their families in a seamless way that serves the interests of children and families simultaneously is problematic. A theoretical flaw underpinning the ideal of integrated services is that families are assumed to be homogenous units. This article explores competing goals for children and families by examining data from the evaluation of three Early Excellence Centres in the north of England piloted by the Department for Education and Employment from 1999 to 2002. The article recommends that extended childcare services should be clearly targeted to the needs of the child‐within‐the‐family, thereby providing a clear theoretical foundation for re‐conceptualising joined‐up services. © 2006 The Author(s). Journal compilation © 2006 National Children's Bureau.

Young Carers: Conventional or Exaggerated Levels of Involvement in Domestic and Caring Tasks?

Historically, research about young carers has focused on defining the tasks and responsibilities undertaken by children caring for ill or disabled family members and the impacts of such care, without reference to the domestic and caring work undertaken by children and young people in families where there are only non‐disabled or well members. This study presents new evidence of what children and young people generally do to assist in the home and examines how the lives of young carers differ from children and young people who are not carers. It concludes by examining the implications of these research findings for evidence‐informed policy and practice. Copyright © 2006 The Author(s). Journal compilation © 2006 National Children's Bureau.

Babies and Young Children in Nurseries: Using Psychoanalytic Ideas to Explore Tasks and Interactions

Anxiety about the emotional experience of young children in nursery has been central in thinking about the development of nursery provision. The main theory of emotion that has been applied to nursery practice has been attachment theory. This article proposes that there is a need to open up our conceptual framework for thinking about emotional interactions in nursery and introduces concepts from psychoanalytic theory that may assist in this. It illustrates the application of these concepts to thinking about nursery tasks and interactions by reference to existing studies of nursery provision. © 2006 The Author(s). Journal compilation © 2006 National Children's Bureau.

Talking about Work: School Students’ Views on their Paid Employment

Seventy 15‐year‐old students in rural and urban Scottish schools, who had previously answered questionnaires about the extent of their part‐time employment, were interviewed. Work appears to be the norm in their communities, 79 per cent having worked and most of the others anticipating working before leaving school. Although the interviewees’ accounts of their jobs give some support to those who argue that most of the paid employment school students undertake is routine and boring, it was also found that most of the young workers found their work satisfying and believed that their experience of working helped to prepare them for adult life. It is proposed that research on the meaning of employment for school students should be extended and that the self‐report techniques currently employed might be supplemented by observational studies. © 2006 The Author(s). Copyright © 2005 National Children's Bureau.

Time, Space and Gender: Understanding ‘Problem’ Behaviour in Young Children

The following article reports on a small‐scale, exploratory study of aggressive and ‘problem’ behaviour in pre‐school children. This project was conceived in the wider context of anxieties about childhood and New Labour’s policy focus on ‘anti‐social’ behaviour in children. Based on interviews with nursery staff and parents in addition to participant observation undertaken in nursery playrooms, this article examines the relevance of time, space and gender for understanding problem behaviour in young children. Taking a social constructionist perspective and drawing on Foucault's ideas in particular, it examines the social processes which regulate and normalise behaviour in young children. © 2006 The Author(s) Journal compilation © 2006 National Children's Bureau.

Science in the service of children, 1893-1935

This book is the first comprehensive history of the development of child study during the early part of the twentieth century. Most nineteenth-century scientists deemed children unsuitable subjects for study, and parents were hostile to the idea. But by 1935, the study of the child was a thriving scientific and professional field. Here, Alice Boardman Smuts shows how interrelated movements--social and scientific--combined to transform the study of the child. Drawing on nationwide archives and extensive interviews with child study pioneers, Smuts recounts the role of social reformers, philanthropists, and progressive scientists who established new institutions with new ways of studying children. Part history of science and part social history, this book describes a fascinating era when the normal child was studied for the first time, a child guidance movement emerged, and the newly created federal Children's Bureau conducted pathbreaking sociological studies of children.

The Violent Years: Responses to Juvenile Crime in the 1950s

In the 1950s, the United States experienced a panic over youth crime. Both the political rhetoric and cultural fears of the period would appear to lead directly to the “get tough” approach popular today. But they did not. Instead, the government's response focused on policies of prevention and rehabilitation. What accounts for this? The answer lies in a set of institutions that framed the issue and biased it in favor of progressive solutions. These institutions—the Children's Bureau, the National Institute of Mental Health, and the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency—provided friendly venues for progressive ideas while preventing other ideas from being considered.

Key Worker Services for Disabled Children: the Views of Parents

This study reports the findings from 68 interviews with parents of disabled children who are users of seven key worker schemes in England and Wales. The interviews which lasted for one hour each, were tape‐recorded, transcribed and analysed according to both a priori and emerging themes. The findings from this study have implications for policy and practice, for example, the necessity of protected time for key workers, the necessity of conveying clear information about the key worker's role, the importance of access to training and information for the key worker, the need for key workers to be proactive, and for their involvement in care plan and review meetings. Copyright © 2006 The Author(s). Journal compilation © 2006 National Children's Bureau