Self-development Of Children Research Articles

Inflence of the Early Prevention Programme “Zippy’s Friends” on Selfdevelopment of Children’s Social Competence and Establishment of Safe Emotional Environment in Educational Institutions

Inflence of the Early Prevention Programme “Zippy’s Friends” on Selfdevelopment of Children’s Social Competence and Establishment of Safe Emotional Environment in Educational Institutions

Playing in virtual spaces: using ethnography to explore a new area of research

Based on a yearlong project, working with elementary school-aged children in Vancouver, Canada, this research indicates how children's own cultural practices create mutable boundaries surrounding their use of the Internet. In particular, I consider how mass-culture products can be creatively manipulated to present the child's sense of self to an unseen audience. Thus, the paper illustrates, through documenting two kinds of virtual play (video and online toys and games), that ethnographic research can be an important tool for investigating how new technologies are socially integrated into children's play worlds. This leads to important indications for future research looking to investigate children's relationships with new media and technology. First, this relationship can be creative and a positive part of children's self-development. Second, the research highlights the interaction between perceptions of risk and access to urban children in out-of-school contexts. These results, I conclude, point towards the importance of focusing further research on how young children use new media and technology to explore aspects of their self-presentation and therefore self-legitimation, from within their home.

‘Puer aeternus’ in the garden

Gardens are fascinating and they are all too easily compared to Paradise. Yet, it seems even more difficult to describe human experience of gardens than to foretell the bliss eternal souls will experience in Paradise. Early recollections of his childhood by Marcel Proust in his novels have offered a glimpse into the construction of emotions in landscape and gardens. They appear as places where time and space share a unique relation, allowing the events of youth to be echoed throughout life when visiting them. This will provide the starting point for a discovery of the role of painters, philosophers and novelists in the social construction of a new bourgeois attitude with regard to gardens in turn-of-the-century France, allowing a search for a new relationship between self-development of children and nature, and introducing an essential difference between the immediate garden around the home and the larger landscape where life awaits them.

The COlIStruction of the Self: A Developmental Perspective. Susan Harter. New York, NY: Guilford Press, 1999.

Within the fields of educational and developmental psychology, interest has grown concerning the question of how cognitive and socioemotional processes work together to construct pathways for the self. In particular, researchers and educators have become increasingly interested in the role that the school plays in children's self-development. According to Jerome Bruner, "the single most universal thing about human experience is the phenomenon of the 'Self" (1996, p. 35) and advocates that education is crucial to its formation. However, despite the strong theoretical claims linking a child's sense of self to school experience, there has been a lack of systematic research on the self within the school context.

The Role of Empathy in Parenting Strategy Choices

Empathy is a personality construct that has received an enormous amount of attention in the psychological literature (cf., Brems, 1989; Dymond, 1950; Rogers, 1957). Its presence or absence has been tied to numerous positive behaviors, such as altruism and helpfulness (Davis, 1983), as well as to the development of psychopathology (e.g., Kohut, 1984). Empathy has been theorized and experimentally shown to have a profound impact on interpersonal relationships. One such interpersonal relationship is that of the parent and (Bavolek, 1984). Clinicians have argued that the absence of empathy in the parent-child dyad can have deleterious effects on the child's self-development and psychological health (Kohut, 1984; Leahy, 1991; Martin, 1976). Similarly, many theorists have postulated that the presence of empathy is central to the healthy growth-promoting relationship between and caretaker (Kohut, 1984; Offerman-Zuckerberg, 1992; Stern, 1989). Consequently, it is not surprising that the teaching of empathy has been at the center of many parent education programs (Brems, Baldwin, & Baxter, 1993; Kissman, 1992; Webster-Stratton & Herbert, 1993). Interestingly, despite all of the discussion about the positive effect of parental empathy on children's psychological growth and health and despite the finding that there is a clear relationship between a lack of empathy and abusive parental behavior (Minor, Karr, & Jain, 1987), we did not find a single project that has investigated the relationship between parental empathy and parental choice of parenting strategies. Such a link has been assumed in the literature (Brems, 1993; Brooks, 1981), but not experimentally documented. It is important to document such a link, especially as longitudinal research has demonstrated that the development of children's own level of empathy is closely tied to parental strategy choice (Koestner, Franz, & Weinberger, 1990). Given that Koestner et al. found that certain parenting strategies more than others were linked to the development of children's empathy, and the assumption that the perpetuation of empathy from generation to generation is desirable, it is important to investigate whether parental empathy translates into positive parental strategy choices. Given the definition of empathy, assumed for the purposes of this study and representative of the literature so far, as awareness of a child's needs [that] entails the ability of the parent to understand the condition or state of mind of the without actually experiencing the feelings of the child (Bavolek, 1984, p. 6), one can assume that empathy would be a skill that reduces the likelihood of parenting being guided by stereotypes or biased by attributions parents make about their children. Specifically, it appears that parents will respond to children in a stereotypic fashion if they are uncertain about what their is feeling or what an appropriate parental response would be in a given situation (Fagot & Hagan, 1991). Further, parents appear to respond both to the gender and temperament of their children when interacting and disciplining them with little regard to the child's actual state of mind or emotional condition (Fagot & Kavanagh, 1993). Such parental responses can reflect not only stereotypic assumptions about the because of the child's membership in a group (e.g., gender), but also attributions imposed upon the based on knowledge gained about the in previous interactions (e.g., temperament). Unfortunately, parental responses and interactions based on previously formed assumptions about the can serve to perpetuate rather than decrease negative behavior patterns (Vuchinich, Bank, & Patterson, 1992). Stereotypic and attributionally biased response styles have been reported to be more common among abusive than nonabusive parents (Reid, Kavanagh, & Baldwin, 1987). We posit that empathy, a trait often lacking in abusive parents (Bavolek, 1984), should be related to reduced stereotypic or attributionally biased responding among parents. …