What is it like to grow up in an orphanage? What do residents themselves have to say about their experiences? Are there ways that orphanages can be designed to meet children's developmental needs and ...to provide them with necessities they are unable to receive in their home communities? In this book, detailed observations of children's daily life in a Cambodian orphanage are combined with follow-up interviews of the same children after they have grown and left the orphanage. Their thoughtful reflections show that the quality of care children receive is more important for their well-being than the site in which they receive it. Life in a Cambodian Orphanage situates orphanages within the social and political history of Cambodia, and shows that orphanages need not always be considered bleak sites of deprivation and despair. It suggests best practices for caring for vulnerable children regardless of the setting in which they are living.
Slowed by Hunger Gronemeyer, Reimer; Fink, Michaela
German research : reports of the DFG,
05/2015, Letnik:
37, Številka:
1
Journal Article
In southern Africa there are over 15 million AIDS orphans. In Namibia, as elsewhere, most are cared for by their extended families. But as traditional structures break down, new initiatives are ...emerging in civil society in an attempt to relieve hardship.
The captain there, I swear, he's in love with a saw tuning in circular to mitre songs of a wounding. Plainer, of course, though she has her appeal, lolling with Safety Pin-Up Girl '95 beside cobweb, ...sawdust, final letters, knives.
Some evidence points to the positive effects of asset accumulation programs on mental health of children living in low-resource contexts. However, no evidence exists as to why and how such impact ...occurs. Our study aims to understand whether child poverty, child work, and household wealth serve as pathways through which the economic strengthening intervention affects the mental health of AIDS-orphaned children.
The study employed a cluster-randomized experimental design with a family-based economic strengthening intervention conducted among 1410 school-going AIDS-orphaned children ages 10 and 16 years old in 48 primary schools in South Western Uganda. To test the hypothesized relationships between the intervention, mediators (household wealth, child poverty, and child's work) and mental health, we ran structural equation models that adjust for clustering of individuals within schools and account for potential correlation among the mediators.
We found significant unmediated effect of the intervention on children's mental health at 24 months (B = −0.59; 95% CI: 0.93, −0.25; p < 0.001; β = −0.33). Furthermore, the results suggest that participation in the intervention reduced child poverty at 12 months, which in turn improved latent mental health outcome at 24 months (B = −0.14; 95% CI: −0.29, −0.01; p < 0.06; β = −0.08). In addition, though not statistically significant at the 0.05 level, at 36 and 48 months, mental health of children in the treatment group improved by 0.13 and 0.16 standard deviation points correspondingly with no evidence of mediation. Our findings suggest that anti-poverty programs that aim solely to improve household income may be less advantageous to children's mental health as compared to those that are specifically targeted towards reducing the impact of poverty on children. Further studies using more comprehensive measures of child work and age-appropriate child mental health may shed more light on understanding the link between asset accumulation interventions, child labor and children's mental health.
•Asset accumulation programs improve children's mental health at 24 months.•Some of this effect occurs through reduction in child poverty at 12 months.•We found no evidence of a mediating effect of the household poverty or child's work.
Described by historians as a "total war," World War I was the first conflict that required a comprehensive mobilization of all members of society, regardless of profession, age, or gender. Just as ...women became heads of households and joined the workforce in unprecedented numbers, children also became actively engaged in the war effort. Adding a new dimension to the historiography of World War I, Maksudyan explores the variegated experiences and involvement of Ottoman children and youth in the war. Rather than simply passive victims, children became essential participants as soldiers, wage earners, farmers, and artisans. They also contributed to the propaganda and mobilization effort as symbolic heroes and orphans of martyrs. Rebelling against their orphanage directors or trade masters, marching and singing proudly with their scouting companies, making long-distance journeys to receive vocational training or simply to find their families, they acquired new identities and discovered new forms of agency. Maksudyan focuses on four different groups of children: thousands of orphans in state orphanages (Darüleytam), apprentice boys who were sent to Germany, children and youth in urban centers who reproduced rivaling nationalist ideologies, and Armenian children who survived the genocide. With each group, the author sheds light on how the war dramatically impacted their lives and, in turn, how these self-empowered children, sometimes described as "precocious adults," actively shaped history.
Illustrates the hidden challenges embedded within the evangelical adoption movement.
For over a decade, prominent leaders and organizations among American Evangelicals have spent a substantial ...amount of time and money in an effort to address what they believe to be the “Orphan Crisis” of the United States. Yet, despite an expansive commitment of resources, there is no reliable evidence that these efforts have been successful. Adoptions are declining across the board, and both foster parenting and foster-adoptions remain steady. Why have evangelical mobilization efforts been so ineffective?
To answer this question, Samuel L. Perry draws on interviews with over 220 movement leaders and grassroots families, as well as national data on adoption and fostering, to show that the problem goes beyond orphan care. Perry argues that evangelical social engagement is fundamentally self-limiting and difficult to sustain because their subcultural commitments lock them into an approach that does not work on a practical level.
Growing God’s Family ultimately reveals this peculiar irony within American evangelicalism by exposing how certain aspects of the evangelical subculture may stimulate activism to address social problems, even while these same subcultural characteristics undermine their own strategic effectiveness. It provides the most recent analysis of dominant elements within the evangelical subculture and how that subculture shapes the engagement strategies of evangelicals as a group.
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