Children Look Research Articles

‘Children Heard, Half-Heard?’: A Practitioner’s Look for Children in the Responsibility to Protect and Normative Agendas on Protection in Armed Conflict

When the United Nations (un) agreed on a definition of the Responsibility to Protect (r2p) at the 2005 World Summit, the two paragraphs it endorsed articulated what r2p stands for, giving the concept a focused but narrow remit around protecting populations specifically from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity in armed conflict. In its next paragraph, the un Membership reiterated concerns on the impact of armed conflict on children echoing the landmark 1612 Resolution by the Security Council on Children and Armed Conflict (caac) adopted a few weeks before. Though side-by-side in the text, caac and r2p were not linked. To this day, for international practitioners in emergency responses, the interaction between both remains unclear. While this simultaneous peak moment for r2p and caac may have occurred by chance, this article describes how both concepts (as advocacy tools and instruments for practitioners to ‘respond’) emerged out of similar concern for protecting civilians – including children – in conflict. However, the link between both concepts should not be overstated. While r2p and caac fit together for the intentions they share, this happened more coincidentally than purposefully. This article argues, taking an international practitioner’s perspective, that both concepts should not be understood as always operating at the same level. caac has grown from an advocacy platform to an umbrella of different programmes, responses, tools and frameworks, including the Monitoring and Reporting Mechanism (mrm) on Children and Armed Conflict. Even if applied with variable success, these tools and approaches under the caac agenda chart some ways practitioners can hope to do more towards protecting children in conflict. But for those same practitioners, delivering on a Responsibility to Protect is a different question – one where their ‘responsibility’ is at best secondary and implicit, because r2p sits squarely as a primary and explicit responsibility of states – who are also the ultimate duty bearers for children’s rights. While the echoes of a child rights agenda can be heard in the conversation around r2p, and while r2p can help frame and drive efforts by child protection practitioners to respond to some of the worst situations children face, r2p is, for the protection agency field officer, an aspirational goal, necessarily out of reach.

ARE YOU BEING HEARD? Getting families the care they need when they need it

Health systems across the world are afloat with new ideas and words – integration, patient-centred care, wraparound services, investing in the early years, soft entry points and making sure no child is left behind. These ideas present practical challenges to service providers developing contemporary child and family services in a rapidly changing environment. This paper describes the experience of managers in an Inner Sydney Local Health District redesigning their service system to meet the care and support needs of all families, including those most vulnerable, within limited resources. Based on literature, current thinking on child and family health and extensive consultation with community partners and stakeholders, Healthy Families Healthy Children (HFHC) is a program that supports the best development of children and enables families to lead healthy and fulfilling lives. The program is underpinned by an ecological model of child health and equity considerations of universal and proportional universalism. HFHC provides universal, tailored and flexible packages of care to ensure the right interventions are provided at the right time to the right families. Although our broad target population is families with children 0-5 years, families experiencing a number of risk factors and requiring additional support are specifically targeted. This is being done in collaboration with a range of government and non-government agencies and community. Since implementation in 2016 we have: - Formally reviewed universal home visiting services to newborns across three organisations and used the report to advocate for policy change and the ‘green light’ to pilot a new model. - Strengthened our universal service by introducing a centralised intake, referral and advice line to assist clients to navigate the care system and a new website to provide a localised online source of information on child health and development. - Designed a new service model where initial screening/risk assessment in antenatal and maternity services is supplemented with a clinical phone call to all families with newborns to review their risk level and determine the appropriate service level response or ‘package of care’. - Attracted new investment and redirected existing resources to an expanded sustained home visiting program with capacity to meet the needs of all families requiring additional support. 131 families are currently enrolled. - Revised eligibility criteria to ensure all vulnerable families and those with low English proficiency were able to receive an evidence-based, structured home visiting program. Program sustainability is a key consideration and we have developed a research and evaluation consortium including academics from three Sydney universities, workforce representatives and consumers. The preliminary framework will be discussed. Program principles are transferable to, and can be localised in other health districts. ‘What would a child and family health service look like if we took a proportionate universalism approach?’ ‘How do you redesign services to continue to provide universal services and enhance sustained services for vulnerable families?’ We will answer these questions in the context of a service design in Sydney Local Health District.

Válečné Dĕtství a Mládí (1939–1945) V Literatuře a Publicistice ed. by Jana Čeňková

Reviewed by: Válečné Dĕtství a Mládí (1939–1945) V Literatuře a Publicistice ed. by Jana Čeňková Katja Wiebe Translated by Nikola von Merveldt VÁLEČNÉ DĔTSTVÍ A MLÁDÍ (1939–1945) V LITERATUŘE A PUBLICISTICE. [Childhood in Times of War (1939–1945) in Literature and Journalism]. Edited by Jana Čeňková. Univerzita Karlova, nakladatelství Karolinum, 2016, 235 pages. ISBN: 978-80-246-3413-5 In many countries and cultures around the world, World War II and the Holocaust are important literary topics in literature for children and young adults. The stories and narratives about the war often center on a child or adolescent protagonist and look at the lives of children in times of war. The volume, edited by Jana Čeňková (Charles University, Prague), sheds light on childhoods in times of war in Czech children's literature and journalism. It also includes Geman-language (and some Dutch and Slovak) works, which necessarily played a role between 1939 and 1945 because of the German occupation of what was then Czechoslovakia. The introductory chapters by Milena Šubrtová, Pavel Suk, and Jan Halada trace the measures of the National Socialist education policies and their impact on the Czech publishing industry. The Board of Trustees for the Education of Youth, created by the National Socialists, was the most influential institution in this respect. It stood behind a Czech version of the young adult series War, Adventure, and Colonial Youth Library of the Berlin publisher Steiniger, published in Prague by Orbis beginning in 1939. The board also encouraged the publication of new magazines that promoted the image of virtuous, patriotic boys and girls true to National Socialist ideology. These magazines adapted formats and special columns from popular Czech youth magazines, such as the idea of a book club. Suk's contribution shows how the National Socialist ideology, most apparent in racist and anti-Semitic content, already exerted its influence before the German occupation—such as in the case of the magazine Mladý Hlasatel, founded in 1935, which printed posters of the Hitler Youth or Nazi interpretations of historical events prior to 1939. Ester Nováková, Luisa Nováková, Jaroslav Toman, and Jana Čeňková examine how Czech children's literature responded to the German occupation and World War II by analyzing individual works and their aesthetics. Adopting similar strategies as adult fiction, children's books published during the occupation tend to set their stories in the past or to anchor them in local traditions. They return to key historical events of Czech history and celebrate the importance of local and regional identities for the country, only obliquely commenting the current occupation by a foreign military force. The early post-war years see the emergence of a long series of children's books that remember life during the war most often from the perspective of child and adolescent protagonists. This raises the question of the intended audience and, hence, the question of what to tell about the horrors of the war, and how. It becomes apparent that many children's books focus on extraordinary situations during the war, such as resistance to the National Socialists or the survival of a Czech woman in a German town. Many also recount traumatic experiences of child protagonists who denounce the actions of the adults. A few essays explore the authorship of literary representations of childhood in times of war. Tamara Bučková shows how authors of German-language books draw on personal memories and use literary devices to give them shape, or they [End Page 67] base their literary storytelling on true events experienced by others. Radek Malý and Jarmila Sulovská present a number of impressive war diaries and childhood memoirs originally not intended for child readers or publication but now published for young readers as relevant, authentic testimonies. Most contributions observe that the Holocaust and World War II are imperative topics of contemporary children's literature. The Slovak children's magazine Slniečko, analyzed by Zuzana Stanislavová, seems to be an exception—for World War II is no longer touched upon after 1990. Many contributors ask whether and how successfully the memories of the war and the Holocaust...

Novel names extend for how long preschool children sample visual information

Known words can guide visual attention, affecting how information is sampled. How do novel words, those that do not provide any top-down information, affect preschoolers’ visual sampling in a conceptual task? We proposed that novel names can also change visual sampling by influencing how long children look. We investigated this possibility by analyzing how children sample visual information when they hear a sentence with a novel name versus without a novel name. Children completed a match-to-sample task while their moment-to-moment eye movements were recorded using eye-tracking technology. Our analyses were designed to provide specific information on the properties of visual sampling that novel names may change. Overall, we found that novel words prolonged the duration of each sampling event but did not affect sampling allocation (which objects children looked at) or sampling organization (how children transitioned from one object to the next). These results demonstrate that novel words change one important dynamic property of gaze: Novel words can entrain the cognitive system toward longer periods of sustained attention early in development.

Eye for positive signs: A practical approach to childhood eye disease.

Eye for positive signs: A practical approach to childhood eye disease.

Introduction to the Special Issue: 20th-Century Origins and 21st-Century Developments of Peer Nomination Methodology.

This issue of New Directions for Child and Adolescent Development looks at current practices and recent advances in peer nomination methodology. Peer nominations provide a key method for assessing relationships, social status, and interpersonal behavior. This introductory article begins with a history of peer nomination methods, with a focus on the early origins of peer informant measures and the nature of Moreno's (1934) sociometric methodology (highlighting fundamental differences from the modern sociometric procedure). Next, the article addresses major changes that have occurred in peer nomination research over the course of the past 2 decades, including the recent focus on popularity and relational aggression, statistical advances, logistical challenges and innovations, and the changing conventions of the nomination procedure itself. The final section includes a brief overview of the articles included in this issue.

What Does the Baby Selfie Say? Seeing Ways of ‘Self-Seeing’ in Infant Digital Cultures

What Does the Baby Selfie Say? Seeing Ways of ‘Self-Seeing’ in Infant Digital Cultures

Time-to-Boundary Function to Study the Development of Upright Stance Control in Children.

Background:The development of postural control across the primary school time horizon is a complex process, which entails biomechanics modifications, the maturation of cognitive ability and sensorimotor organization, and the emergence of anticipatory behaviour. Postural stability in upright stance has been thus object of a multiplicity of studies to better characterize postural control in this age span, with a variety of methodological approaches. The analysis of the Time-to-Boundary function (TtB), which specifies the spatiotemporal proximity of the Centre of Pressure (CoP) to the stability boundaries in the regulation of posture in upright stance, is among the techniques used to better characterize postural stability in adults, but, as of now, it has not yet been introduced in developmental studies. The aim of this study was thus to apply this technique to evaluate the development of postural control in a sample population of primary school children.Methods:In this cross-sectional study, upright stance trials under eyes open and eyes closed were administered to 107 healthy children, divided into three age groups (41 for Seven Years' Group, Y7; 38 for Nine Years' Group, Y9; 28 for Eleven Years' Group, Y11). CoP data were recorded to calculate the Time-to-Boundary function (TtB), from which four spatio-temporal parameters were extracted: the mean value and the standard deviation of TtB minima (Mmin, Stdmin), and the mean value and the standard deviation of the temporal distance between two successive minima (Mdist, Stddist).Results:With eyes closed, Mmin and Stdmin significantly decreased and Mdist and Stddist increased for the Y7 group, at Y9 Mmin significantly decreased and Stddist increased, while no effect of vision resulted for Y11. Regarding age groups, Mmin was significantly higher for Y9 than Y7, and Stdmin for Y9 was higher than both Y7 and Y11; Mdist and Stddist resulted higher for Y11 than for Y9.Conclusion:From the combined results from the spatio-temporal TtB parameters, it is suggested that, at 9 years, children look more efficient in terms of exploring their limits of stability than at 7, and at 11 the observed TtB behaviour hints at the possibility that, at that age, they have almost completed the maturation of postural control in upright stance, also in terms of integration of the spatio-temporal information.

Shopping for kids’ luxury brands: young mothers’ identity quest in retail spaces

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to focus on mothers as key influencers in luxury retailing contexts. Design/methodology/approach Using a semiotic interpretation of mothers’ discourses, the authors underline the identity motivations for purchasing luxury apparel for their pre-adolescent children. Findings The paper shows that when shopping for luxury brands for their pre-adolescent children, mothers manage discrepancies between their “real” and “idealised” selves as well as the pushes and pulls of being a mother and a woman. Research limitations/implications The findings point to possible future research on this topic, particularly with regard to investigating how luxury stores and retailers can adapt so as to satisfy mothers’ identity quest. Practical implications Managers of luxury brand retail spaces looking at the future of retailing could analyse their store environment in the light of these mothers’ identity-related motivations. As well as focussing on how children look, store layout and merchandising should provide different spaces for mothers’ identity expression, using new in-store digital technologies. Originality/value This study is one of the first to analyse luxury shopping for children taking the point of view of mothers. The paper underlines how young mothers build their new maternal identity and their projected relationship with their child through purchases of children’s luxury goods in specific retail environments.

Fostering Friendship

Fostering Friendship

Re-imagining Horror in Children's Animated Film

Re-imagining Horror in Children's Animated Film

“It’s Not All Hard Candy and Horse Shit”: Christmas in Cat Square

“It’s Not All Hard Candy and Horse Shit”Christmas in Cat Square photography by Aaron Canipe Inside the Cat Square Superette, above the meat counter, under the garish fluorescent lights and a watercolor painting of the store, a plaque lists four decades of Cat Square mayors. Among them is my great uncle Harold Canipe, who owns and operates the Superette and who served as the Mayor of Cat Square in 2008. Each year, the mayoral election is held at a makeshift poll set up in the Superette days before the annual Christmas parade, as the unofficial title comes with the duty of leading that gathering. Cat Square is a small community in Vale, North Carolina, tucked in the foothills of Catawba County. To outsiders, it might appear as Flannery O’Connor described Manley Pointer’s whereabouts in “Good Country People”: “not even from a place, just from near a place.” Since 1974, the Cat Square Christmas Parade has been held on the second weekend of December. My great aunts and uncles remember the parade’s more modest beginnings with participants on horseback handing out cartons of cigarettes and beer to spectators. Growing up, I heard tales of the homemade floats, the teams of horses that line up on Zur Leonard Road, and the pieces of hard candy thrown to the crowds. People spoke of life- sized sleighs made out of unused lumber, miles of modified trucks and hotrods, and children and adults acting out mobile nativity scenes. The number of people attending and participating has grown to include thousands who make their way into town, though no one officially keeps track of the numbers. I started attending annually in 2012 to document the parade and solidify in my mind its near-mythical status. The camera became my excuse to talk to the beauty queens, artists, musicians, rebels, angels, and street preachers of my family’s community. Between “ho ho ho”s from one of Santa’s helpers atop a homemade pirate ship, parade- goers noted, “Cat Square: it’s not all just hard candy and horse shit!” [End Page 23] Click for larger view View full resolution Meat with holiday display paper. [End Page 24] Click for larger view View full resolution Children look down Zur Leonard Road. [End Page 25] Click for larger view View full resolution Tobacco advertisement. [End Page 26] Click for larger view View full resolution Cotton ball Santa and Cheerwine. [End Page 27] Click for larger view View full resolution Street preacher. [End Page 28] Click for larger view View full resolution Miss Rebel 2014. [End Page 29] Click for larger view View full resolution Teenagers watching the parade. [End Page 30] Aaron Canipe Aaron Canipe was born and raised in Hickory, North Carolina, and earned his MFA in Experimental and Documentary Arts from Duke University. He helped co-found the publishing imprint Empty Stretch (emptystretch.com), and his work has been exhibited throughout the Southeast. He lives and works in Durham, North Carolina. See more work at aaroncanipe.com. Copyright © 2016 Center for the Study of the American South

Children With Autism Show Reduced Information Seeking When Learning New Tasks.

Information-seeking behaviours occur when children look to adults in order to gain further information about a novel stimulus/situation. The current study investigated information seeking in children with developmental delays (DD) and those with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) during a simulated teaching situation. Twenty preschool-aged children with ASD and 15 children with DD were exposed to a series of videos where a teacher provided novel instructions and demonstrated novel actions. We found that children with DD, but not those with ASD, demonstrated information-seeking behaviours in response to instructions that exceeded their level of understanding. This suggests that children with DD may use information-seeking behaviours to compensate for their cognitive and language difficulties when novel actions are being taught, while the same is not true for children with ASD.

Children Looked After in England – Reflections on the Past, Present and Future

This paper explores the debates surrounding out-of-home care for children who are unable to live with their birth parents and become looked after by the state in England. The historical context for the provision of out-of-home care is considered. Themes, including the use of residential care, foster care, adoption and placements of children from Black and minority ethnic children, are identified. These themes are re-examined in light of the current political and policy context, including the impact of globalisation. The paper concludes some reflections on future trends.

Moving ahead: what will a renewed Countdown to 2030 for Women and Children look like?

The Countdown to 2015 initiative (Countdown) represents a remarkable consortium of academicians, UN agencies, and development partners, which over the past decade, has focused its attention on tracking and analysing coverage of key interventions for reproductive, maternal, newborn, and child health (RMNCH) across 75 high burden countries that account for more than 95% of global maternal and child deaths. Initially started to ensure follow-up on the landmark Lancet Child Survival series, with innovative consolidation and presentation of coverage data on key interventions by country and regions, Countdown rapidly evolved with an expansion of its mandate to include reproductive and maternal health indicators across the continuum of care and more recently, analysis of nutrition trends and health policies. Countdown is also an example of the collective power of champions, innovative scientifi c and collaborative work across academic groups, civic society organisations, and UN agencies and partnerships across various sectors. Elements that have worked include strong buy-in from the UN and development agencies and the legitimacy of Countdown analysis by countries. Important strengths of Countdown have included multidonor support, relatively fl exible governance and technical structures, strong links to the Partnership for Maternal and Child Health, and more recently to the independent expert review group (iERG) of the UN Secretary General for monitoring MDGs 4 and 5. Countdown’s core work on monitoring and measuring coverage of key interventions to aff ect MNCH interventions across the continuum of care represents one the major sources of consolidated information that governments, development agencies, civic society organisations, and the iERG have used in their work. Some aspects of Countdown’s work have also been challenging especially fi nancial dependence on a limited set of donors, perceptions of independence in view that much of its core funding fl owed through UN agencies, slow devolution of technical work to the regions, and relatively low-key advocacy. The latter is also evidenced by a gradual transition from standalone Countdown meetings as was the case in 2005 and 2008 to more limited sessions and visibility in other global MNCH meetings since. The release of its fi nal report and the adoption of a new set of global Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) invoke the question of what next for the Countdown? There are several core features of Countdown that should be preserved as we move into the SDG era. The collation, presentation, and analysis of a core set of metrics centred on the coverage of crucial lifesaving interventions remains pertinent and critical to continued monitoring of SDG 3 (ensuring healthy lives and promotion of well being for all at all ages). Countdown further developed a range of equity measures across wealth quintiles and other markers such as geography, sex, and ethnicity that will be important to retain and link to assessments of equitable impacts of universal health care on MNCH. Of late, the group’s foray into geospatial analysis of inequities represents a powerful set of instruments to aff ect policies and investments. These must underpin any future monitoring of progress and accountability. A core working group on health fi nancing has monitored global resource fl ows with a specifi c focus on overseas development assistance for RMNCH and sequential assessments of fi nancing. Additional analyses of health systems and policies have allowed insight into awareness within countries of evidence-based key interventions for RMNCH and subsequent policy development and implementation at scale. A major development in recent years has also been the conscious move to analyse factors determining RMNCH progress at national or subnational level. Examples of these Countdown country case studies include insightful analyses of progress in child survival in Niger, maternal health in Bangladesh, and progress across RMNCH in Tanzania. At least six further case studies are underway in a range of countries including Peru, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Kenya, and Malawi and have engaged local experts and institutions as well as regional collaborations. Despite other similar exercises more recently, Countdown remains the dominant global group making available to countries a wide range of technical, fi nancial, and political support for multistakeholder capacity development for monitoring and evaluation. In view of Countdown’s regular inputs to the iERG in monitoring global progress in relation to Milennium Development Goals (MDGs) 4 and 5, it should continue with support to the newly proposed independent accountability panel for RMNCH. Multistakeholder partnerships, RMNCH focus, shift to regional and national support, and continued development of improved scientifi c methods will, we believe, keep the Countdown process relevant for the forthcoming SDG era. There is clear recognition of the need to address issues that go beyond mortality. The challenge would be to link the Countdown process to emerging issues, such as adolescent health and noncommunicable diseases without sacrifi cing the core mission of addressing RMNCH. The new global strategy Lancet 2016; 387: 2060–62

White Elephants on Campus: The Decline of the University Chapel in America, 1920–1960 by Margaret M. Grubiak (review)

Reviewed by: White Elephants on Campus: The Decline of the University Chapel in America, 1920–1960 by Margaret M. Grubiak David R. Bains White Elephants on Campus: The Decline of the University Chapel in America, 1920–1960. By Margaret M. Grubiak. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2014. 184pp. $28.00. In a 1927 Princeton student cartoon, a child looks at the university’s huge new Gothic chapel and asks his mother, “Is that thing a white elephant?” (2). In this excellent study, architectural historian Margaret Grubiak explores the debate over such buildings. She examines university leaders’ aspirations, architects’ plans, and the response of students and alumni at several historically Protestant elite universities. These include Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Johns Hopkins, and Pittsburgh. Grubiak argues that chapels like Princeton’s were part [End Page 83] of a not-too-successful twentieth-century effort to retain a central role for religion in these universities’ missions. She investigates four architectural strategies used by designers. First, new chapels advertised the significance of religion through their large size. Second, following a common liberal approach to tensions between religion and intellectual life, the chapels made an emotional rather than an intellectual appeal for the importance of religion through beauty and the evocation of mystery. Third, planners gave chapels central locations, often pairing them with libraries as centers of campuses. Lastly, in a very engaging chapter she explores how non-ecclesial buildings such as Pittsburgh’s Cathedral of Learning and Yale’s Sterling Memorial Library employed ecclesiastical designs to communicate that “all learning was sacred and the mission of the university in part religious” (94). Many disputed the claim that these chapels were needed for the university to educate the “whole man” (19). Some Protestants at Princeton thought its chapel was too Catholic and sensual in form and thus antagonistic to an intellectual religious life. At Yale and Johns Hopkins, plans for grand chapels were gradually abandoned. Even the innovative cathedral-like academic buildings at Pittsburgh and Yale invited not only religious reverence for learning, but also the mockery and trivialization of religion. Through an examination of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Grubiak suggests that after World War II, while the desire to ground scientific learning in religious morality remained strong, modern aesthetics and the need to house diverse worship services resulted in small campus chapels with little traditional iconography. Henceforth religion, in both architecture and practice would be found on the margins rather than at the center of university life. Assessment of the current life of these chapels is beyond the book’s scope. In an epilogue, however, she discusses a 2006 controversy over a cross in Wren Chapel at William and Mary. This and general observations leads her to conclude that these buildings are indeed now [End Page 84] “white elephants,” expensive monuments with a diminished and unclear role (126). This lean, engaging, smartly illustrated book is ideal for classroom use in courses on American higher education, architecture, or religion. Grubiak thoroughly grounds her argument in the historiography on religion in higher education. Fewer connections are drawn to developments in religious architecture. More attention to the relation of these buildings to historic Protestant spatial practices might place today’s decentralized approach to campus religion in a different light. Discussion of these buildings’ place in the history of American religious architecture would also strengthen the connections she draws between campus chapels and trends in American religion. Nonetheless this focused, insightful book is essential reading for all interested in religious architecture or the place of religion in higher education. David R. Bains Samford University Copyright © 2015 American Catholic Historical Society

Children's reading and writing success: the role of diligence and intelligence

In today's world, young children look for attention and engage in positive or negative behaviour to attain it and it is important that teachers recognise the diligence and intelligence worth of their students on a consistent basis. This study posits two constructs: diligence and intelligence, which express or reflect individual children's efforts towards achieving reading and writing success. A Diligence and Intelligence Inventory was developed with assistance from experts to elicit data from 6-, 7- and 8-year-old children's teachers on their pupils' achievements in reading and writing. Using Cronback analysis and construct validation procedures, the instrument was certified to have internal consistency. The results from 321 preschool children revealed a significant statistical difference between diligence and intelligence. Thus, both diligence and intelligence are not singing from the same hymnbook. The academic and practical implications of this study to educational practice include a greater need to complement the efforts of young children in their pursuit for balanced educational development.

Children Looked After

Children Looked After

Clinical analysis of tufted angiomas in infants

Objective To describe and examine the clinical characteristics and spectrum of tufted angiomas(TA) in infants so as to explore the therapeutic approaches to Kasabach-Merritt phenomenon(KMP). Methods The clinical and follow-up data of 24 patients with TA were retrospectively analyzed between Jan.2009 and Mar.2013.The median age of the patients was 7.5 months(ranged from 18 days to 2 years), including 10 male and 14 female.Surgical excision and observation were chosen according to the lesion and conditions of the patients.The mean follow-up period was 3.6 years(1.2 to 5.4 years). The changes in the patients's condition were established by evaluating platelet counts, and the size of lesion. Results Common clinical features included dusky red or violaceous infiltrating cutaneous lesion, thrombocytopenia, pain or decreased function and hyperhidrosis or hypertrichosis.The following 3 clinical patterns of TA progress were described: spontaneous complete or partial regression(n=2, 8.3%), TA without complications and persistence over the years(n=9, 37.5%), and TA complicated by KMP(n=13, 54.2%). The average interval of development of KMP for delayed cases was 45.2 days(ranged 0 d to 4 months). Each of the 13 patients who developed KMP subsequent to initial presentation was symptomatic at the time KMP was detected(enlarged lesion, n=8; increased lesion firmness with change in cutaneous stain, n=3; and respiratory distress, n=2). All of 13 patients were cured by surgery.Complete surgical resections were performed on 10 cases.The thrombocyte count was back to normal within 1-3 days post operation, and hemoglobin and blood coagulation function gradually returned to normal within 1 to 2 weeks.Other 3 cases received major resection surgery.The number of platelets in the patients were unstable, but significantly higher than that of preoperational stage.The platelet count remained above 60× 109/L.The residue lesions in 2 cases disappeared gradually after the operation and medication were given within 3-6 months.And the other case died of multiple organ failure post-operation. Conclusions Surgical intervention can be applied to TA that severely makes damage to children's appearance or looks or may be complicated with KMP or functional abnormality.A closely monitored policy seems appropriate for the early small tumor without severe complications.And it is necessary to monitor the number of the platelet regularly and find the KMP by as early as possible.TA associated with KMP is vitol to infants.And surgical therapy after clear diagnosis should be done as early as possible.The surgical therapy is a reliable management with higher curative rate, short disease period and minimal side-effect. Key words: Infants; Tufted angiomas; Thrombocytopenia; Kasabach-Merritt phenomenon; Treatment

The Griffin's Gaze and the Mask of Medusa: Self‐Referential Motifs in Andrea Mantegna's Trial of St James

In Mantegna's Trial of St James, two figures catch our eye: a Roman officer and a child dresses up as a soldier. These characters, who are ignoring the main action of the scene, can be understood as the agents of a meta-discourse. With his eyes gleaming from a face in a shadow, the child looks pensively into the distance. The fierce mask on his shield, which faces the viewer, peers towards the officer on the left, who himself is gazing down at the mask adorning the clasp on his cape. The metaphors of the petrifying stare of Medusa, the prophetic vision of the seer, and the penetrating eyes of the lion are combined by Mantegna with typological theology and with the motif of the body as the prision of the soul. Such an interpretation of this Medusan iconography, it is argued, reveals an iconoclastic conception of the mission of art.