Pre‐school staffs’ attitudes toward foods in relation to the pedagogic meal

The aim of this study, with the pedagogic meal in focus, was to identify pre‐school staff members’ attitudes to the role of food and meals as part of daily activities at pre‐school. Interviews were carried out at 12 pre‐schools and a total of 34 pre‐school staff participated. The staff revealed strong opinions as well as ambivalence towards how food and meals should best be integrated into their daily work and pedagogic activities. The pre‐school staffs’ lack of or insufficient education and knowledge regarding food and nutrition resulted in an ambivalent and uncertain situation with respect to how they should see themselves as teachers in the meal situation. Nevertheless, most of the staff had a clear perception of what it meant to practice a pedagogic meal. It meant helping and encouraging the children to help themselves and serving as an adult model for the children at table, though this pedagogic activity was uncommon. While the staff were satisfied with the pre‐schools’ role of catering for the children, they expressed concern about or even mistrust towards the children's parents. Despite, or perhaps due to, their inadequate knowledge about food and nutrition and the lack of specific aims for the pedagogic meal, they assumed that the public sector was a better educational institution regarding foods and a better guarantor for children's food habits and dietary intake. As the teachers’ identities have changed over the past years they have not yet found a solid ground for determining how food and meals could be integrated into their everyday work as pre‐school teachers and childminders.     

Children's perception of dinner conversation with parents in Japan

The children's perception of dinner and dinner conversation with their parents was surveyed for sixth‐grade students of elementary school in Japan. The data were analysed from the gender of children and attending parents. The children had dinner and dinner conversation more frequently with their mother than with their father. With father attendance, girls and boys had the same frequency of dinner and dinner conversation, although, with mother attendance, girls had dinner conversation more frequently than boys. Most of the children felt happy when they had dinner with their parents. However, a lower percentage of children felt happy when having dinner conversation with their parents, thought that they were important to their parents and thought dinner conversation was useful. More children felt happy during dinner and dinner conversation with their mother than with their father. However, there was no perceived difference in the usefulness of the conversation based on the father or the mother attending. The contents of conversation were greatly affected by which parent was attending. Subjects concerning children's manners were talked about more frequently in conversation with mothers than with fathers. Children had more frequent conversations with their father about ‘social issues’ and the ‘parents’ surroundings’ than with their mother. Girls had more frequent conversations on a wider variety of subjects with their mothers than boys. Girls could more easily share in their mothers’ knowledge or sense of values through dinner conversation. Boys were, for the most part, excluded from this process in conversation with either parent.     

Balancing Work and Family Life during the Life Course

This paper discusses how work and family obligations can be better reconciled in EU countries by adopting a life-course perspective. It stresses that longer and deeper involvement in paid employment allows people to exploit their longer life to reconcile the two ambitions of, first, investing in the next generation as a parent and, second, pursuing a fulfilling career in paid work. Greater flexibility of working time over the life course requires more individual responsibility for financing leave. Moreover, rather than shielding older insiders through employment protection, labor-market institutions should enable parents of young children to easily enter and remain in the labor market. Finally, more activating social assistance and in-work benefits should replace passive income support for breadwinners. This paper is a revised draft of a paper prepared for high-level expert conference on the Social Policy Agenda for the European Union on October 28/29 in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. The author thanks Evert Jan van Asselt, Peter Cuyvers, Henk Don, Bas Jacobs, Ruud de Mooij, Wouter Roorda, Martijn de Wildt and two anonymous referees for helpful comments on earlier drafts, and Peter Cuyvers, Laura Thissen, and Wouter Roorda for research assistance.     

留守儿童心理问题的战略应对

留守儿童是我国近年来出现的一个热点和突出社会话题,其特定的身份及经历易产生消极的心理问题,已引起了很多心理学者的关注。积极心理学是20世纪在西方兴起的新的研究思潮,主张挖掘和培养人的积极心理品质,以应对生活的挑战和压力。本文基于积极心理学的相关研究成果,针对留守儿童的一些特定心理问题,提出了相应的干预措施,以期有助于留守儿童心理健康水平的提高。     

Advertising targeting young children: an overview of 10 years of research (2006–2016)

A review of 138 published academic articles was conducted to provide an up-to-date and comprehensive overview of academic research of the past decade (2006–2016) on advertising directed to young children up to 12 years old. The research overview resulted in a conceptual framework comprising five research domains that were found to be most prominent. For each of these five domains, an overview, discussion and future research agenda is presented. We conclude that much of the research of the past decade included food advertising and its effects. Progress has been made in the domain of children's advertising processing, specifically with regard to advertising literacy. Despite the growing importance of embedded advertising, many of the new ad formats remain neglected (e.g. native and mobile advertising). Additionally, only a few studies investigated which executional factors (e.g. humour) are effective in advertisements to target children and social influences are also less often considered.     

The impact of parental migration on non-cognitive abilities of left behind children in northwestern China

Despite the vast literature surrounding various aspects of left behind children (LBC)’s development in China, very few studies have examined the development of, and impact on their non-cognitive abilities as a result of parental migration. Using survey data consisting of 5002 eighth graders from 160 middle schools in northwestern China, this paper investigates how parental migration affects children’s non-cognitive abilities, as is measured by Big Five components of conscientiousness, extraversion, neuroticism, agreeableness, and openness, as well as children’s grit. We narrow our analysis to long run and short run migration subsamples and use the propensity score matching method to address the potential selection bias issue. Our results show that mother’s migration is particularly harmful to the development of children’s non-cognitive abilities, as mother is usually the primary caregiver and mother’s migration makes less economic contribution to the family. In the long run, LBC with migrant mother tend to have lower levels of conscientiousness and grit; they also have higher level of neuroticism (or lower level of emotional stability). In the short run, when mother migrates, children tend to have lower levels of conscientiousness, agreeableness and openness.     

Will elders provide for their grandchildren? Unconditional cash transfers and educational expenditures in Bolivia

We take advantage of repeated cross‐sectional household surveys and a sharp discontinuity created by the introduction of an unconditional cash transfer to elders in Bolivia, to evaluate its impact on educational expenditures on children within a household. We find positive and significant impacts of the program at the aggregate level. We also find that the program has stronger effects on indigenous populations as well as on female and rural populations. Our results are robust to a series of falsification tests, survey structure, model specification, and estimation methods.     

Balancing health,harmony and hegemony: Parents' goals and strategies in children's food related consumer socialization

Parents play a pivotal role in socializing their children for healthy eating. The objectives of the present study were (1) to identify food socialization outcomes valued by parents, and (2) to study how parents socialize their children for (healthy) eating at home and during food shopping. Including both parents' perceptions of valued food socialization outcomes and associated processes addresses a significant gap in the food socialization literature. The study used semi‐structured, in‐depth interviews with parents of young children. Data were subsequently analysed by interpretive, thematic procedures. The sample consisted of middle‐ to high‐income families from two cities in Denmark. Findings reveal four main food socialization goals valued by parents: (1) Nutrition and Health, (2) Healthy Relationship with Food, (3) Food Assimilation and (4) Self‐Regulation and Autonomy. Parents prioritized children's acquisition of a healthy relationship with food which included preserving family relations and harmony, more than strictly attending a nutritious diet, contrasting the focus on the nutritional value of diet usually emphasised by public health authorities. The study therefore concludes that parents' notions of what constitutes healthy diets for their children is not completely aligned with common nutrition‐oriented recommendations. Also, fathers were found to play a very active role in their children's food‐related consumer socialization. The findings underline the importance of addressing the priorities and strategies of both mothers and fathers when marketers and policy makers target contemporary families regarding children's food socialization.     

Cash transfer program and child underweight—Empirical evidence from a causal mediation analysis

Despite the existence of a voluminous literature on cash transfer programs, little is known about their impacts on the underweight of children. To fill the knowledge gap, this study uses a unique individual panel data set to analyze how participation in the Children Sponsorship Program (CSP) improves underweight status among needy children and adolescents in Taiwan. This study examines not only the program effect on children's underweight, but also underscores the potential pathways behind the program effect by employing a causal mediation analysis. Our analysis finds that exiting the CSP has a negative impact on the improvement of underweight status. Moreover, eating breakfast every day and receiving pocket money from parents can be two significant mediators that link the effect of exiting the CSP and the change in underweight status among children and adolescents.     

Ecological self-image and behaviours for children living on the streets of Harare

ABSTRACT

The present study sought to explore the relationship between street childhood and adolescent ecological self-image. The research objectives were to investigate the nature of ecological self-image for street children and to determine the ecological behaviours for street children in Harare. A psycho-ethnographic research design was employed. The participants were 16 street-living adolescent children aged between 12 and 18 years and six key informants, all in Harare, Zimbabwe. A total of 22 participants took part in this study. Snowballing was used to recruit key informant interviewees, while purposive sampling was used to recruit participants for focus group discussions, in-depth interview, and participant and non-participant observations. Thematic content analysis was used for analysing the data. Data analysis revealed that the adolescent street children's ecological self-image is largely negative. These street children seemed to have estranged from their biological families to identify with the streets.