Role In Children Research Articles

Early socialization of prosocial behavior: Patterns in parents’ encouragement of toddlers’ helping in an everyday household task

Patterns in parents’ socialization of prosocial behavior in 18- and 24-month-olds (n=46) were investigated during an everyday household chore that parents were asked to complete with their toddlers. Two socialization approaches were distinguished, one focused on specific requests for concrete actions needed to complete an immediate, concrete goal (“action-oriented”), and a second focused on the more abstract needs and emotions of the parent and the child's role as a helper (“need-oriented’). Parents were equally active at both ages in trying to elicit children's help but used different strategies with younger and older toddlers. With 18-month-olds they used more action-oriented approaches, whereas with 24-month-olds they increased their use of need-oriented approaches. They also regulated the attention of younger toddlers more, and more often socially approved older toddlers’ helping. Thus, how parents prompt, support, and encourage prosocial behavior changes over the second year from utilizing primarily concrete, goal-directed requests in the service of the immediate task, to increasingly emphasizing more abstract needs and emotions of the recipient and the child's role as a helper.

‘It's our turn to play’: performance of girlhood as a collective response to gendered ageism

ABSTRACTIn our society that values men over women and youth over old age, sexism and ageism intersect to erode women's status more rapidly and severely than men's. However, limited attention is given to women's responses to their devaluation, particularly collective efforts to either resist or accommodate dominant beliefs about ageing women. We examine membership in the Red Hat Society, an international organisation for middle-aged and older women, as a response to gendered ageism. Drawing on data from semi-structured interviews with members (N = 52), our analysis focuses on the group's ‘performance of girlhood’, which involves adopting children's social roles, dressing up and playing. We examine its resonance with a dominant cultural metaphor for old age as ‘second childhood’, illustrating how it not only provides opportunities for resistance to gendered ageism but also contributes to its entrenchment. The behaviours constitute a performative act that resists gendered ageism by increasing ageing women's visibility and asserting their right to leisure. However, its accommodative features reproduce inequality by valuing youth over old age and depicting older women as girls engaging in frivolous activities, which can be seen as obstructing social change.

Family decision-making in emerging economies

The purpose of this paper is to examine the children's role in family decision–making in emerging economies. Using a structured questionnaire, a survey was conducted with 175 children from India. The results revealed that children across cultures have high influence over family purchase decisions. Moreover, consistent with the ranking of India as a culturally high power distance nation, Indian children had lower influence than their Turkish counterparts. The findings of the study have interesting implications for global marketing practitioners. As Indian parents are more authoritative than US and Turkish parents, marketers need to keep in mind that they do need to appeal to children as much as they may need to appeal to parents. This paper contributes to the extant literature available in the area of family's decision–making. This study holds its importance as it provides detailed and insightful comparisons between two emerging markets.

Structural equation modelling of child's role in family buying

Consumer behaviour is getting increasingly complex. Corporates are managing their relationships with their customers to generate benefits for both customer and company. This paper focuses on decision making in a family and analysing how children impact their parents' consumer decisions. This study also proposes an effective framework to carry out a structural analysis on the family buying process and understand the child's influence in the family purchase for various products. A structure equation model was employed to incorporate child's consumer socialisation agents, child's use of pester power through various influence strategies, the three stage family buying process and finally the child's influence in the buying of three selected product categories. The paper ends with a conclusion and implication for marketers.

Child-Friendly Cities in a Globalizing World: Different Approaches and a Typology of Children's Roles

The Child-Friendly City (CFC) label means different things to different people, influenced by their professional interests. We distinguish several approaches to CFCs and sketch their emergence within the context of profit-oriented urban markets shaped by processes of globalization. Against this background, we propose a typology of children acting as consumers, users, entrepreneurs and producers, and situate the papers in this special issue of Children, Youth and Environments within it. The conclusion briefly discusses observations arising from these papers and CFC work more generally.

Child-Friendly Cities in a Globalizing World: Different Approaches and a Typology of Children's Roles

The Child-Friendly City (CFC) label means different things to different people, influenced by their professional interests. We distinguish several approaches to CFCs and sketch their emergence within the context of profit-oriented urban markets shaped by processes of globalization. Against this background, we propose a typology of children acting as consumers, users, entrepreneurs and producers, and situate the papers in this special issue of Children, Youth and Environments within it. The conclusion briefly discusses observations arising from these papers and CFC work more generally.

Mayan Children's Creation of Learning Ecologies by Initiative and Cooperative Action.

This chapter examines Mayan children's initiatives in creating their own learning environments in collaboration with others as they engage in culturally relevant endeavors of family and community life. To this end, I carry out a fine-grained ethnographic and linguistic analysis of the interactional emergence of learning ecologies. Erickson defines learning ecology as a socioecological system where participants mutually influence one another through verbal and nonverbal actions, as well as through other forms of semiotic communication (2010, 254). In analyzing learning ecologies, I adopt a "theory of action" approach, taking into account multimodal communication (e.g., talk, gesture, gaze, body positioning), participants' sociospatial organization, embodied action, objects, tools, and other culturally relevant materials brought together to build action (Goodwin, 2000, 2013; Hutchins, 1995). I use microethnographic analysis (Erickson, 1992) to bring to the surface central aspects of children's agentive roles in learning through "cooperative actions" (Goodwin, 2013) and "hands-on" experience (Ingold, 2007) the skills of competent members of their community. I examine three distinct Learning Ecologies created by children's initiatives among the Mayan children that I observed: (i) children requesting guidance to collaborate in a task, (ii) older children working on their own initiative with subsequent monitoring and correction from competent members, and (iii) children with near competence in a task with occasional monitoring and no guidance. I argue that these findings enrich and add power to models of family- and community-based learning such as Learning by Observing and Pitching In (Rogoff, 2014).

Important Roles of Children's Songs and Nursery Rhymes in Speech Rehabilitation of Hearing Impaired Children

Important Roles of Children's Songs and Nursery Rhymes in Speech Rehabilitation of Hearing Impaired Children

Consent procedures in pediatric biobanks.

The inclusion of children's samples in biobanks brings forward specific ethical issues. Guidelines indicate that children should be involved in the consent procedure. It is, however, unclear how to allocate an appropriate role for children. Knowledge of current practice will be helpful in addressing this issue. Therefore, we conducted an international multiple-case study on the child's role in consent procedures in pediatric biobanks. Four biobanks were included: (1) LifeLines, (2) Prevention and Incidence of Asthma and Mite Allergy (PIAMA), (3) Young-HUNT3 and (4) the Oxford Radcliffe Biobank contribution to the Children's Cancer and Leukaemia Group tissue bank (ORB/CCLG). Four themes linked to the child's role in the consent procedure emerged from the multiple-case study: (1) motives to involve the child, (2) informing the child, (3) the role of dissent, assent and consent and (4) voluntariness of children to participate. We conclude that biobank characteristics influence the biobank's motives to include children in the consent procedure. Moreover, the motives to include children influence how the children are involved in the consent procedure, and the extent to which children are able to make voluntary decisions as part of the consent procedure. This insight is valuable when designing pediatric biobank governance.

Losing the Child They Thought They Had: Therapeutic Suggestions for an Ambiguous Loss Perspective with Parents of a Transgender Child

In our culture, gender is a deeply felt, value-rich, organizing principle; it informs our understanding of who we are as an individual, as well as who we are supposed to be and how we are supposed to act within relationships. This is especially evident in family relationships, and perhaps most strongly in the relationships of mothers and fathers with their sons and daughters. Thus, when a person comes out as transgender or transsexual, parents often experience a profound sense of loss and confusion about their child's new identity and role in the family. In this article, I discuss parental experiences of grief in response to their transgender child's gender transition and propose that parents who struggle with a child's gender transition may be experiencing ambiguous loss. I discuss these experiences in terms of ambiguous loss theory and introduce the concept of dual ambiguous loss. I also provide clinical suggestions for using an ambiguous loss framework with these parents, and offer directions for future research.

Educational imperatives and the compulsion for credentials: family migration and children's education in East Asia

This paper provides an examination of recent scholarship on family migration for children's education in the context of East Asia, in an attempt to counter tendencies towards ‘adultism’ in migration studies [White, A., C. Ní Laoire, N. Tyrrell, and F. Carpena-Méndez. 2011. “Children's Roles in Transnational Migration.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 37 (8): 1159–1170]. It highlights the significant role that children do, in fact, play in precipitating contemporary migration, and educational migration provides an appropriate lens through which to do this. First, the paper considers some of the transnational household forms to have emerged in response educational migration. It then focuses on theorising the important drivers underpinning educational migration, including the acquisition (by children) of cultural and linguistic capital and the notion of children as ‘accumulation strategies’ [Katz, C. 2008. “Childhood as Spectacle: Relays of Anxiety and the Reconfiguration of the Child.” Cultural Geographies 15: 5–17]. It then turns to consider some of the implications of such mobility, alighting in particular upon its gendered nature, and the ways in which local geographies invariably impinge upon migrant families’ strategic intentions. It concludes with some thoughts on how the role of children might be better integrated into understandings of migration.

Beyond Columbus: Helping Young Children Develop a Conceptual Understanding of “Exploration”

This article presents an approach to teaching concepts through reading. It acknowledges the importance of children's active roles in the learning process as they make sense of the world around them through the content they are taught. In this article, the authors use the example of elementary level teachers who work to develop children's social studies concepts through content-rich texts. The findings suggest a strong relationship between students' domain-specific knowledge and their future success.

Divorce in Norwegian Same‐Sex Marriages and Registered Partnerships: The Role of Children

Using Norwegian register data on the total population of same‐sex couples who formalized their unions from 1993 through 2010 (N = 3,422, 52% male), this study addressed the level and correlates of divorce among these couples as compared with all opposite‐sex marriages in the same period (N = 407,495). In particular, the authors investigated the role of same‐sex parenting, which has received little study so far. Multivariate results confirmed that same‐sex couples had a higher divorce risk compared with opposite‐sex couples and that female couples were more divorce prone than male couples. Furthermore, having children was negatively related to divorce among female couples, whereas male couples with common children were more divorce prone than their childless counterparts. No evidence was found that the gender gap in divorce or the difference between same‐sex and opposite‐sex couples narrowed over the study period.

The Politics of Childhood in Cold War America Ann MarieKordas. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2013.

Politics of Childhood in Cold War America Ann Marie Kordas. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2013.In Politics of Childhood in Cold War America, Ann Marie Kordas argues that childhood was a unique prominent political vehicle during America's contest with its communist rivals. Divided into five chapters focused on parenting practices, educational reform, children's consumer culture, gender roles, and juvenile delinquency, Politics of Childhood distils the predominant ideologies of the time from an impressive range of texts, including child-rearing and educational works, etiquette manuals, magazine and newspaper articles, government studies, essays written by children for school assignments, and-most prominently-educational films. It is unfortunate that the book could not supplement this fascinating material with illustrations, but the variety of texts addressed speaks to Kordas's extensive knowledge of the era.In the first chapter, Father No Longer Knows Best: Parenting and Parent-Child Relationships, she focuses on the shift in parenting ideals that took place after World War II: whereas previous decades had stressed a need for inner-directed citizens, self-regulating individuals designed to meet the requirements of a production-oriented (18), postwar American society was other-directed and therefore feared conflict, worshipped conformity, and discouraged citizens from doing anything to differentiate themselves from other members of the group (27). Chapter Two, Lessons for Liberty: Schooling, reveals how educational reforms responded directly to perceived Soviet threats. Kordas shows, for example, an increased emphasis on science, a subject at which Americans would need to be adept in order to remain competitive. Educational materials also took on a propagandistic tone, emphasizing the superiority of American values and the pitfalls of communism. As the author points out, it was in 1954, after all, that the Pledge of Allegiance became a mandated classroom ritual.Chapter Three, All American: Child CitizenSoldier, ventures outside of the classroom to examine the consumer culture of children. From spy kits to chemistry sets, the message sent to children, particularly boys, was that they needed to be properly trained for inevitable conflict. Children could also serve their country by preparing to take on families of their own. Chapter Four, The Dating Game: Gender Roles, shows how children's culture stressed the inculcation of traditional gender norms. …

The Influence of Music Media on Gender Role and Self-identity: Perceptions of Children Aged 6 and 10 years

There are currently widespread concerns around the impact of media on children's healthy development. This study investigated whether music media influences young children's gender role and self-identity. Thirty-four Grade 1 children and 38 Grade 4 children participated in an experimental study to explore their attitudes towards their own and the opposite gender, their perspectives about gender- and self-presentation, and whether a one-off exposure to music videos influenced their views. Results showed that children demonstrated attitudes consistent with gender stereotypes seen in contemporary music media. The findings indicate a need for early intervention to help children develop healthy attitudes around gender role and self-identity.

Investigation of Gender Role Behaviors in Boys With Hypospadias: Comparative Study With Unaffected Boys and Girls

The purpose of the study was (1) to investigate gender role behaviors of boys with hypospadias compared with groups of unaffected boys and girls using parental reports and direct observations; and (2) to directly observe effects of socialization (mothers' presence) on children's gender role behaviors. Ages of 19 children with hypospadias ranged from 3 to 7 years, and each of them were matched to controls of unaffected boys and girls by age. All the children participated with their mothers. Children's gender role behaviors and their mothers' behaviors were evaluated using an observation coding system. Mothers also completed questionnaires regarding their children's gender role behaviors. Results indicated no atypical gender role behavior for the boys with hypospadias and no direct effects of socialization on their gender role behaviors. However, differences were found in negative communicative behaviors between boys with hypospadias and unaffected boys, suggesting a possible role of socialization.

“I will send badass viruses.” Peer threats and the interplay of pretend frames in a classroom dispute

This paper explores threats as they appear in children's everyday dispute interactions. The main purpose is to extend understandings of children's interactions and disputes in order to show how young boys construct threats in pretend frames within a classroom peer dispute by drawing upon the resources of the video game world and a verbally constructed fight. The conceptual and methodological frameworks underpinning the analysis are conversation analysis and Goffman's concept of frame. The analysis focuses on one episode that illustrates how the boys, in the absence of the teacher, invoke, share and switch frames within the dispute. Using pretence, they posit threats and build attack strategies in a video game and in mass fight frames, even though they are in a classroom and unable to complete the threats at that moment. The analysis points out that the pretend threats are different to other sorts of threats and escalate the dispute sequence. Threats in the pretend frame, as in the video game frame, are also opportunities to bring activities outside school into the classroom. Hence, this study also looks at how video game playing is used as a resource when not playing. The implications for broader educational practices exemplify how language and social interaction function in children's peer interactions by uncovering the multifaceted aspects of peer culture, friendship and children's agentive roles in maintaining and creating social and moral order in different realities.

Supporting Portuguese residential child care staff: An exploratory study with the Incredible Years Basic Parent Programme

Children in residential care have experienced high levels of social, emotional and behavioural difficulties and behaviour control by staff is an issue of concern. This study evaluated a parenting intervention, Incredible Years Basic Parent Programme (IY), delivered in Portuguese short-term residential child care centres. In a non-randomised control trial, two groups of staff carers (27 carers) received the IY programme. Two other groups of carers (20 carers) didn’t receive any form of intervention. Self-report measures were used to assess carers’ child rearing practices, sense of competency, and depression levels. Measures were administered at baseline, 6-month and at 12-month follow-up. The findings indicate that each child care centre is a specific dynamic system and that the interventions didn’t have the impact expected on some variables. Groups that didn’t receive any intervention had some improvements on some variables. The main positive finding was the improvement at 12 months of empathic attitudes in one of the intervention groups and improved perceptions of the children's role in the other. In conclusion, the incorporation of a training programme such as the IY in child care placements can be a valuable intervention and at least part of the answer in enhancing worker development.

Longitudinal Relations Between Parent–Child Conflict and Children’s Adjustment: The Role of Children’s Sleep

Sleep was examined as a process variable in relations between verbal and physical parent-child conflict and change in children's internalizing and externalizing symptoms over time. Participants were 282 children at T1 (M age = 9.44 years; 48% girls), 280 children at T2 (M age = 10.41 years), and 275 children at T3 (M age = 11.35 years). Children reported on parent-child conflict, sleep was assessed with actigraphy, and parents reported on children's internalizing and externalizing symptoms. Autoregressive effects for sleep and internalizing and externalizing symptoms were controlled to examine change over time. Supportive of intervening processes, physical parent-child conflict at T1 and increased change in internalizing and externalizing symptoms at T3 were indirectly related through their shared association with reduced sleep continuity (efficiency, long wake episodes) at T2. Findings build on a small but growing literature and highlight the importance of considering the role of sleep in relations between family conflict and child development.

Children's participation in shared decision-making: Children, adolescents, parents and healthcare professionals' perspectives and experiences

Purpose of the researchDespite decision-making featuring throughout the trajectory of cancer care, children's participation in decision-making remains an area much under-researched and complicated by conflicting opinions. This study explored children's participation in shared decision-making (SDM) from multiple perspectives from one haematology/oncology unit in Ireland. Methods and sampleQualitative research design was used to explore participants' experiences of children's decision-making. Interviews were conducted with children11The term ‘children’ is used to denote both children and adolescents and to avoid cumbersome repetition. aged 7–16 years (n = 20), their parents (n = 22) and healthcare professionals (n = 40). Data were managed with the aid of NVivo (version 8). Key resultsParents and children's roles in decision-making were significantly influenced by the seriousness of the illness. Cancer is a life-threatening illness and so the treatment ‘had to be done’. Children were not involved in major decisions (treatment decisions) as refusal was not an option. They were generally involved in minor decisions (choices about care delivery) with the purpose of gaining their cooperation, making treatment more palatable, giving back a sense of control and building trusting relationships. These choices were termed ‘small’ decisions that would not compromise the child's welfare. Some adolescents were aware that choices were not ‘real’ decisions since they were not allowed to refuse and expressed feelings of frustration. ConclusionsHealthcare professionals and parents controlled the process of SDM and the children's accounts revealed that they held a minimal role. Children appeared content that adults held responsibility for the major treatment decisions. However, they desired and valued receiving information, voicing their preferences and choosing how treatments were administered to them.