Children's Narratives Research Articles

‘If my parents find out, I will not see my phone anymore’: Who do children choose to disclose online sexual solicitation to?

AbstractChild online sexual solicitation has become a significant form of child sexual abuse. Disclosure of online sexual solicitation is a multifaceted and complex process. The role of the disclosure recipient is crucial in the disclosure process, with respect to the initiation of the disclosure, how much children disclose, recantations and the children's well‐being. The current study aimed to explore children's experiences, perceptions, challenges and obstacles regarding disclosing online sexual solicitation as revealed in their forensic interviews. The sample, obtained from the Service of Forensic Interviews with Children in Israel, included 32 Israeli children who were sexually solicited online and participated in forensic interviews. A thematic qualitative methodology was used to analyse the children's narratives. The findings demonstrated that children tend to disclose online sexual solicitation to their peers and not to their parents. The children provided three main reasons for this tendency: sexuality, technology and the recipient's response. The current study's findings highlight the important role of peers in the disclosure process of online sexual solicitation. Moreover, the findings reveal children's difficulties disclosing online sexual solicitation to their parents. Practical implications of children's online sexual solicitation disclosure, future recommendations and study limitations are discussed.

The Structure of the Children's Musical Narrative on the Example of V. Rebikov's Miniature "Lesson Preparation" Op. 37 No. 2

The subject of the study is the structure of children's musical narrative on the example of a miniature by a Russian composer, pianist, representative of musical modernism, musical reformer and writer Vladimir Ivanovich Rebikov (1866-1920) "Preparing a lesson" from the cycle "Pictures for Children" Op. 37. Narrative means the presence of a musical narrative structure, assuming the narrator's voice, plot, main character hero, chronotope. The analysis of these components will enable a comprehensive understanding of the concept of the composition. The aim of the work is to analyze the structure of the children's musical narrative through the prism of the perception and interpretation of musical text characteristic of the child's skills and abilities. The methods used in the work are : source studies, musical and stylistic analysis. The scientific novelty of the work consists in determining the features of the children's narrative in the musical art, lexical preferences defined by the children's picture of the world, which can include the character, title, remarks, design and musical "children's mistakes" expressed using syncopation, dynamics, fermated pauses, fermata, pedals, harmony, register and pitch; construction models of their description by referring to topos (figures); characteristics of the originality of the children's narrative in relation to piano performance. The results of the study reveal the specifics of the syntactic features of the children's narratives of Vladimir Rebikov's miniature and the representation of the viability of this phenomenon in the musical art.

Identifying Hashtag Cultures to Study the Construction of Childhood Image and Parents’ Aspirations

This study considers posting behavior as a cultural practice as enacted with Instagram postings marked by hashtags #fashionkids and #letthekids and examines whether and how the two hashtags reflect two distinct online cultures about childhood. The study is important for two reasons. First, it offers socio-cultural theory to the study of social media and provides researchers with a theory-based method of using Instagram as a data source to detect and study digital cultures. Second, it contributes to the research activities on the phenomena of sharenting and the changing narrative of childhood in domestic contexts. The inquiry included analyses of the scale of a sample of Instagram postings with hashtags of #fashionkids and #letthekids posted in a 12-day period in 2016, geographical locations where the postings were made, searches of words with linguistic functions in captions, and networking strategies. Analysis of the scale, the networking patterns, the verbal accounts, and the geographical locations where the postings happened help inform us about the magnitude and diverse purposes of the hashtags. Overall, the findings underscore greater diversity among #letthekids posts compared to the more focused content of #fashionkids’ postings.

Evaluation devices in the narratives of deaf/hard of hearing and hearing Arabic-speaking adolescents.

Pragmatic language use in general and the use of evaluation devices (EDs) are very important components in everyday communication and expressing thoughts and feelings in narrative production. However, very little is known about the use of evaluative devices in the narratives of Arabic-speaking adolescents, especially those who are deaf and hard of hearing (DHH). The present study investigated the use of EDs in personal oral narratives elicited from 124 hearing and DHH Arabic-speaking adolescents. Each participant was asked to tell a personal story about a time he or she was in a dangerous situation. Narratives were transcribed and coded for nine different types of evaluation. A three-way interaction of group (hearing/DHH) by gender (Female/Male) by evaluation type emerged such that female hearing adolescents' narratives contained significantly more frames of mind than the narratives of DHH females and hearing males and more hedges than DHH females. In addition, hearing males' narratives contained more hedges than those of DHH males and more negative comments than the narratives of both hearing females and DHH males. The present research identifies factors that facilitate narrative abilities by DHH. Discussion centres on explanations for group and gender differences in terms of exposure and language socialization. What is already known on this subject Although narratives have been researched extensively in comparisons of hearing and deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) children, only a few studies have examined pragmatic language use in general and evaluation devices in particular. These studies show that the narratives of DHH children and adolescents contain fewer figurative expressions, frames of mind and hedges and that children who are DHH have difficulty comprehending and producing metaphors. Very little is known about the use of evaluative devices in the narratives of Arabic-speaking adolescents, especially those who are DHH. What this study adds The present study found that hearing participants produced significantly more evaluation devices (Eds) than their DHH peers, and female participants produced significantly more EDs than their male peers. Moreover, hearing females' narratives contained more frames of mind and more hedges than did the narratives of DHH females; also, hearing females' narratives contained more frames of mind than those of hearing males. In addition, hearing males' narratives contained more hedges than those of DHH males. Finally, hearing males' narratives had more negative comments than both the narratives of hearing females and those of DHH males. Clinical implications The one evaluation device produced in large numbers (hedges) by adolescents who are DHH was expressed in only one of two ways. One important clinical implication of this finding is that pragmatic language in general and use of EDs in particular should be part of any speech and language evaluation. Another takeaway is that intervention should attempt to provide rich exposure to social communicative language, providing many ways to convey each function, enabling adolescents to communicate in different contexts.

Personal Narratives of 10-Year-Old Children in Iceland: Verbal Productivity, Word Diversity, and Topics

Introduction: The feasibility of using a standard protocol, labelled as the Global TALES, to elicit personal stories was tested across 10 different countries between 2019 and 2021. Personal narratives have not been investigated in Iceland in a similar way. The aim was to explore personal narratives of monolingual children in Iceland by using the Global TALES (2018) protocol to investigate verbal productivity, semantic diversity, and narrative topics. Methods: Twenty-seven children (ages 9; 8–10; 9) with typical language development produced personal stories in response to six emotion-based prompts contained in the protocol. The children were interviewed by using the Zoom platform because of COVID restrictions. Children’s spoken language was analysed for total number of utterances (TNU), total number of words (TNW), number of different words (NDW), mean length of utterances in words (MLUw), and proportion of words with grammatical errors. The narrative topics were coded and documented. Results: The spoken language measures showed that there was a large individual variability within the group on all metrics examined. The mean TNU was 62.1 (SD 20.2) utterances, the mean for TNW was 546 (SD 219) words, the mean for NDW was 206 (SD 62) words, and the MLUw was 8.6 (SD 1.5) words in an utterance. Despite the variability in spoken language performance, around 70–75% of the participants produced TNU, TNW, NDW, and MLUw within +/− 1 SD from the mean. The topics of the stories were most frequently related to personal achievement or relationships with the family or friends. Conclusion: The Global TALES (2018) protocol can be used to elicit personal stories in 10-year-old children in Iceland. The results related to verbal productivity and the topics of interest were in line with previous studies around the world.

Between The Real And The Imaginary: Truth And Lies In The Psychoanalytic Encounter.

When reality is too much to bear, bodymind unity can fracture, creating self-deceptions, distortions, and disguises of emotional experience that amount to unconscious lies. Without clarity regarding what is real and what is imaginary, emotional truth is difficult to discern. Lies disrupt the development of a subjective sense of self, making it difficult to trust sensations, emotions, or thoughts. In the absence of this trust, a patient may form a delusion that they do not exist. Working psychoanalytically with patients traumatized in infancy and early childhood requires the analyst to experience a somatic link between herself and the patient, thereby enabling a process that was inhibited and, in some cases, nearly aborted to resume functioning. Clinical material is presented illustrating a negative hallucination of not existing following an emotional experience that could not be borne as well as bodymind dissociation that separated the patient's psychic pain from her childhood narrative. The author concludes that these methods of coping with trauma prevent the grieving necessary for truth to become bearable and the mind to grow.

Espace fermé, espace ouvert : Proust à la recherche du familier

L’espace limité de la chambre acquiert des valeurs particulières chez Proust. L’œuvre A la recherche du temps perdu est bâtie sur de nombreuses oppositions qui s’expriment entre autres au niveau de l’espace: aussi, le romancier révèle-t-il comment la chambre peut être soit menaçante, soit accueillante, selon l’imagination qui y est investie. C’est ainsi que la chambre à coucher du narrateur enfant, bienveillante, peut devenir un supplice lorsque la nuit tombe et il doit se retrouver seul, et que la chambre d’hôtel, menaçante et inquiétante, peut se muer en espace tranquille et rassurant grâce à l’intervention du personnage féminin, à savoir la grand-mère. La dualité des deux côtés, familier et étranger, renferme une antithèse mais aussi une complémentarité qui s’avèrent fondamentales dans l’initiation et l’expérience du futur écrivain.

Trilingual children’s narratives: a longitudinal study of lexical development

ABSTRACT This paper focuses on vocabulary development in oral language productions of three elementary school-age sibling pairs growing up in a trilingual setting. This longitudinal study describes the development of the children's narrative competence over three years. The corpus analysed consists of retellings of animated films. The contribution deals with the lexical development in the three languages of the children, in particular the length of the productions, lexical diversity and lexical sophistication. Lexical diversity is measured by the Guiraud Index. It is assumed that the children's vocabulary becomes more diverse with increasing age. Lexical sophistication is examined by measuring the average frequency of words used by the participants. It is assumed that as children's vocabularies grow, they will include more and more ‘rare’ low-frequency words in their productions. Assuming that the school language is the dominant language, the question is whether lexical diversity and sophistication increase with age in all three of the children's languages, or whether this is only the case in the school language. The results show that lexical development varies from child to child. However, a certain trend can be observed, indicating that school vocabulary is becoming more sophisticated.

From being ignored to engaging in dialogue: Young boys' narratives of children's participation in child–parent conflicts

AbstractThis paper examines children's opportunities to participate in everyday child–parent conflicts as revealed in young boys' fictional narratives. The data were collected from 19 boys aged 3–6 years using the Story Magician's Play Time method. Narrative analysis yielded four story types: ignored participation stories, parent‐directed participation stories, child‐directed participation stories and dialogical participation stories. The study illustrates that when considering children's participation in child–parent conflicts, differences between children in their opportunities to participate in resolving conflicts should be taken into account. The boys' stories draw attention to the importance of children's right to a voice and influence in child–parent conflicts.

Edith Nesbit's contemporary fairy tales: The influence of childhood experiences on artistic manifestation

This research conducts a comprehensive examination of the influence exerted by early life experiences on an author's literary corpus, with a particular emphasis on Edith Nesbit (1858-1924), the author of children’s novel, and her incorporation of childhood memories to enrich the contemporary fairy tale genre. Utilizing Melanie Klein’s (1882-1960) theoretical framework, a renowned Austrian-British psychoanalyst, the investigation endeavours to deliver an exhaustive analysis of Nesbit's artistic persona. Nesbit's children's narratives, as modern fairy tales, embody an internal realm of unconscious reverie akin to Klein's concept of phantasy. Central to Nesbit's tales are young protagonists who confront challenges associated with separation from caregivers, the establishment of identity, reality appraisal, body image maturation, and object relations. Edith Nesbit's harrowing childhood experiences shaped her into the imaginative author she ultimately became. By delving into the realm of fantasy and creativity, Nesbit achieved a sense of completeness and resilience, allowing her to overcome her feelings of loss and vulnerability. This research aims to shed light on the complex link between a writer's formative years and their creative expressions by examining the remnants of Nesbit's early life experiences. Furthermore, by emphasizing Edith Nesbit's ability to transform her experiences into her artistic body of work, this study also demonstrates the power of artistic expression as a means of self-exploration and healing.

Child Narrator, Narratorial Uncertainty, and Ethics in Lin Haiyin's My Memories of Old Beijing

In China, Lin Haiyin's Chengnan jiushi [My memories of old Beijing] is one of the most critically acclaimed children's novels of the twentieth century. Set in the 1920s, it portrays several characters, most of whom were confined to the periphery of Chinese society at that time, through the eyes of a child. This article examines the ways in which child narration represents socially marginalised characters and subverts stereotypes about them. The child narrator challenges adults’ interpretations of events as well as their evaluations of the socially othered characters and gives opportunities to the marginalised to make their voices heard. The narrator's unreliable and uncertain narration also serves as a strategy to resist the othering of socially vulnerable people.

Disfluencies in the narratives of Russian-Hebrew bilingual children with and without Developmental Language Disorder (DLD)

ABSTRACT The present study examined disfluencies in the narratives of Russian-Hebrew bilingual children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) and Typical Language Development (TLD) in both Russian (home language) and Hebrew (societal language), with a focus on the independent and combined effects of language disorder and cross-linguistic differences on the rates and loci of disfluencies. Narratives were collected from 44 bilingual children (14 with DLD), ages 5;7–6;6, using a story retelling procedure. The narrative coding system targeted ratios of the following disfluencies (per C-unit): silent pauses, repetitions, self-corrections, and filled pauses. Silent pauses longer than 0.25 sec were identified using PRAAT software© and were classified according to the following durations: more than 0.5 sec, 1 sec, 1.5 sec, and 2 sec. In addition, the loci of pauses (utterance-initial or utterance-internal) and repetitions (content or function words) were coded. Overall, children with DLD and TLD had comparable rates of disfluencies but differed for pauses longer than 0.5 sec and repetition of content words in both languages. For the overall ratio of pauses (more than 0.25 sec), children with and without DLD had more pauses in Russian. Long pauses and repetition of content words reflect difficulties for bilingual children with DLD in dealing with the demands of storytelling, in particular planning processes. A higher ratio of pauses in Russian suggests that they reflect lower proficiency in that language.

Multimodal narratives in contemporary Brazilian children's literature

Although it is not a contemporary creation, there is evidence in our context of the growth of multimodal narratives addressed primarily to Brazilian children readers. This is the offer of narratives that, based on different strategies, are built not only through the literary text, but also through its dialog with other languages, of which we highlight here illustration and graphic design. Among such works, we propose the reading of Pra lá, by Luiz Tatit (2012), Dante Onzzetti and Edith Derdyk; Era uma vez outra vez, by Edith Chacon and Priscilla Ballarin (2022); and O que é que isso é? (2020), by Alexandre Rampazo. We aim to highlight the need for a synergic reading of the different languages that make up the book object in order to different reading layers can be reached. We also aim to discuss how the reading of multimodal works demands a different kind of reading and reader.

Analysis of the Narratives with Characters That Make Ethnic Diversity Visible—Miraculous: Tales of Ladybug & Cat Noir

This study follows the line of different authors who examined the visibility of ethnic diversity in children’s television series and the psychoeducational implications of these media narratives for children. Specifically, this work analyses the behaviours/actions developed by the model characters of cultural diversity and how these characters promote a perspective on diversity that conditions children. Employing a qualitative methodology, we use content analysis and critical discourse analysis as tools to be able to read, describe and interpret said content. The results highlight that these children’s programmes present a culture that reinforces certain values and behaviours. Likewise, the TV programmes analysed present stories marked by models of cultural diversity that contribute to the maintenance of certain social structures and the normalisation of inequality. We believe that educational institutions, through media education, should go deeper and teach students to look critically, deciphering codes of the audiovisual language present in the elements of children’s stories. In the complex society of the 21st century, we must consider that the needs of children change depending on how their identity intersects with aspects such as ethnicity, class, gender, etc., in order to equip them with the appropriate tools to deal with these problems.

The development of a digital story-retell elicitation and analysis tool through citizen science data collection, software development and machine learning.

In order to leverage the potential benefits of technology to speech and language therapy language assessment processes, large samples of naturalistic language data must be collected and analysed. These samples enable the development and testing of novel software applications with data relevant to their intended clinical application. However, the collection and analysis of such data can be costly and time-consuming. This paper describes the development of a novel application designed to elicit and analyse young children's story retell narratives to provide metrics regarding the child's use of grammatical structures (micro-structure) and story grammar (macro-structure elements). Key aspects for development were (1) methods to collect story retells, ensure accurate transcription and segmentation of utterances; (2) testing the reliability of the application to analyse micro-structure elements in children's story retells and (3) development of an algorithm to analyse narrative macro-structure elements. A co-design process was used to design an app which would be used to gather story retell samples from children using mobile technology. A citizen science approach using mainstream marketing via online channels, the media and billboard ads was used to encourage participation from children across the United Kingdom. A stratified sampling framework was used to ensure a representative sample was obtained across age, gender and five bands of socio-economic disadvantage using partial postcodes and the relevant indices of deprivation. Trained Research Associates (RA) completed transcription and micro and macro-structure analysis of the language samples. Methods to improve transcriptions produced by automated speech recognition were developed to enable reliable analysis. RA micro-structure analyses were compared to those generated by the digital application to test its reliability using intra-class correlation (ICC). RA macro-structure analyses were used to train an algorithm to produce macro-structure metrics. Finally, results from the macro-structure algorithm were compared against a subset of RA macro-structure analyses not used in training to test its reliability using ICC. A total of 4,517 profiles were made in the app used in data collection and from these participants a final set of 599 were drawn which fulfilled the stratified sampling criteria. The story retells ranged from 35.66 s to 251.4 s in length and had word counts ranging from 37 to 496, with a mean of 148.29 words. ICC between the RA and application micro-structure analyses ranged from 0.213 to 1.0 with 41 out of a total of 44 comparisons reaching 'good' (0.70-0.90) or 'excellent' (>0.90) levels of reliability. ICC between the RA and application macro-structure features were completed for 85 samples not used in training the algorithm. ICC ranged from 0.5577 to 0.939 with 5 out of 7 metrics being 'good' or better. Work to date has demonstrated the potential of semi-automated transcription and linguistic analyses to provide reliable, detailed and informative narrative language analysis for young children and for the use of citizen science based approaches using mobile technologies to collect representative and informative research data. Clinical evaluation of this new app is ongoing, so we do not yet have data documenting its developmental or clinical sensitivity and specificity.

Unfinalizability: An exploration of a young child’s emergent identities through living stories

Drawing on a Bakhtinian idea of unfinalizability and a semiotics lens of multimodality, the authors conceptualize children's everyday narratives as chains of living stories that emerge at home and in early childhood education settings. In this study, the authors interpret the living stories and emergent identities of Dylan, a five-year-old Vietnamese boy, in Aotearoa New Zealand. Two narrative chains of Dylan's living stories were selected to represent his intersecting and emergent identities around the significant event of the birth of his sibling, when he became the eldest brother. The findings will inspire early childhood educators and researchers to value learnings derived from stories and use the pedagogy of unfinalizability in their interactions with young children.

Особенности восприятия детьми дошкольного возраста игрушек-монстров (на примере Хагги Вагги)

<p>The article deals with the problem of perception of monster toys that have become popular recently by modern children and the features of playing with these toys (using the example of the Huggy Wuggy toy). The popularity of monsters in modern media narratives for both adults and children is shown. The analysis of existing studies of monster toys is carried out. The results of an empirical study in which 298 children from 4 to 6 years old participated are presented. As part of the study, a conversation was conducted with children, the techniques of "Drawing a man" and "Drawing a Huggy Wuggy", observation of children's play. The results obtained suggest that for most modern preschoolers, the Huggy Wuggy toy is primarily a "status" item, and is rarely used in children's games. Knowing about the game "Poppy Playtime" and having an idea of its content, children, as a rule, do not use its plot in the game. In general, playing with Huggy Wuggy and other toys in this series is no different from playing with other soft toys. The negative emotional load and aggressive tendencies identified in children associated with the image of Huggy Wuggy are associated with the content of YouTube videos, where negative information about the content of the game and about this character is presented as affectively as possible.</p>

Executive Function and Narrative Language Abilities in Emergent Bilingual Preschoolers: An Exploratory Study.

In light of the importance of preschool oral narrative skills as precursors to literacy, this exploratory study examined expressive language skills among emergent bilingual Latine preschoolers using a naturalistic personal narrative task. To understand the factors that support language use in the personal narrative context for this population, we examined the contribution of children's executive function (EF) skills to their narrative language abilities. Children completed two subtests from the Preschool Self-Regulation Assessment to measure EF and produced two personal narratives in response to conversational prompts. A series of linear regressions were used to evaluate the relation between children's EF skills and their narrative production ability, narrative organization, and expressive language skills derived from automated analyses of narrative samples. EF was found to predict children's ability to produce a personal narrative but not the language skills children demonstrated in these narratives. The current findings suggest that EF is implicated in emergent bilingual Latine children's narrative abilities. At the preschool age, the contribution of EF to narrative language production is apparent in the global task of producing a narrative, rather than in the organizational or linguistic features of the narrative. As such, supporting both EF and narrative skills might be an important means of facilitating preliteracy among bilingual children.

Vulnerability and Agency in the Time of COVID-19: The Narratives of Child and Youth Care Workers in South Africa

In this paper, we use data generated through one-on-one interviews with 12 purposively sampled Child and Youth Care Workers to examine their narratives of work and life-related vulnerabilities and agency during the peak of the COVID-19 global pandemic in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. Our findings show that Child and Youth Care Workers were vulnerable to poor mental health. Indeed, working and socialising during the height of COVID-19 posed a mental toll on the Child and Youth Care Workers in this study, who experienced fear, uncertainty, anxiety and stress. Moreover, these workers faced challenges with working under the so-called new normal, which was instituted as part of a non-pharmaceutical response to slow and curb the spread of COVID-19. Finally, our findings show that Child and Youth Care Workers actively identified and applied specific emotionally-focused and physically-focused coping mechanisms to deal with the burden brought on by the pandemic. The study has implications for CYCWs working during crisis periods.

Not all diagnoses are created equal: Mothers’ narratives of children, ADHD, and comorbid diagnoses

Social research examining patients' and caretakers' narration of mental disorders, including ADHD, has been remarkably silent about comorbidity. Centering the theme of uncertainty and the question of what is “at stake” in mothers' mental health narratives of children (Kleinman, 1988), we characterize the patchwork process by which mothers deploy ADHD and comorbid diagnoses to account for key experiences and struggles in their and their child's lives. We found that ADHD had limited purchase in accounting for the emotional and social difficulties that were most urgent in mothers' narratives, despite the medical authority behind the ADHD label, which the mothers mostly accepted. However, mothers remained pervasively uncertain about the relationship between ADHD and comorbid mental health conditions, paralleling debates on the relationship between ADHD, emotion, and comorbidity in the psychiatric and psychological literature.Our findings contribute a conceptualization of comorbidity as a web of diverse moral vocabularies, institutional outcomes and perceptions of personhood, through which mothers of ADHD children maneuver over time. Through this perspective we illustrate how ADHD is co-constructed as a narrow neurological problem of ‘attention,’ and demonstrate the overlooked and crucial ways that comorbidity may shape parents' pragmatic and interpretive negotiation of ADHD.Kleinman, Arthur. (1988). The illness narratives: Suffering, healing, and the human condition. New York: Basic Books.