Africa's Future, Africa's Challenge compiles the latest data and viewpoints on the state of Sub-Saharan Africa's children. Topics covered include the rationale for investing in young children, policy ...trends in early childhood development (ECD), historical perspectives of ECD in Sub-Saharan Africa including indigenous approaches, new threats from HIV/AIDS, and the importance of fathers in children's lives. The book also addresses policy development and ECD implementation issues; presents the ECD programming experience in several countries, highlighting best practices and challenges; and evaluates the impact of ECD programs in a number of countries.
Early child development in china Wu, Kin Bing; Young, Mary Eming; Cai, Jianhua
2012., 2012, 07-06-2012, 2012-07-06, 2014-05-14, 20120706
eBook, Book
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In the past 30 years, China has reached the target of lifting 500 million people out of poverty. The rate of increase in human development indicators has become the second fastest in the world, ...allowing China to enter the ranks of middle-income countries. As the most populous country, accounting for one- fifth of the world's population, its transformation has been unprecedented in human history. Scientific evidence and international experience in the past 10 years have found that early child development (ECD) is key to human development, as it lays the foundation for the rest of life. Early child development includes physical, psychological, emotional, language, behavioral, and social development. Experience in the early years of life will determine healthy development and happiness in the rest of life. Research has found that investment in ECD is the most cost effective strategy to improve human development. In China's demographic transition, the population of children and youth is declining in absolute numbers, and the investment of raising them can increase on a per capita basis. This study has been in the making since 2009. It was prepared during a time when China was charting its course of development under the 12th Five-Year Plan (2011-2015). The study began with an agreement between the World Bank and China's National Population and Family Planning Commission (NPFPC) for a collaborative study on ECD. Concurrently, China's Ministry of Education invited the World Bank to conduct an overall review of the education sector, in order to provide it with inputs and suggestions as it prepared China's national plan for medium- and long-term education reform and development (2010-2020). In reviewing achievements and challenges in the education sector, the Bank found that there was much room for expanding and improving preprimary education for children ages 3-6. The Ministry of Education appreciated the Bank's identification of this need and set ambitious goals for preprimary education in the national education plan.
The ebook edition of this title is Open Access and freely available to read online. Childhood should be free of violence, and victims of childhood maltreatment should be entitled to participate as ...expert informants in research about these experiences. Placing children and adult survivors at the heart of research efforts on child maltreatment is critical to effective response and prevention measures in fighting this form of violence. Embedded in the European context, Participatory Research on Child Maltreatment with Children and Adult Survivors presents a mosaic of contexts, theories, and methods relating to children’s and adult survivors’ participation in research about their adverse experiences. Contributors demonstrate how research can mobilize children and adult survivors to become agents in constructing and disseminating reliable, evidence-based knowledge about child maltreatment. Enriching ongoing debates about ethical concerns and challenges of participatory research in the field of child maltreatment, this contribution to Emerald Studies in Child Centred Practice highlights the advantages that participation as a human right and as a valued endeavour of scientific knowledge accumulation can bring to communities of researchers and helping professionals. The authors of this book are members of a designated working group of the pan-European network on Multisectoral Responses to Child Abuse and Neglect in Europe (Euro-CAN), supported by the European Cooperation on Science Technology (COST Action 19106), that promote children’s and child abuse survivors’ participation in research on violence.
This book aims to fill gaps in existing knowledge about early childhood development (ECD) efforts in Latin America and the Caribbean by reviewing a selection of ECD programs in the region, including ...those in early childhood education, health, and nutrition, and distilling lessons related to their design, implementation, and institutionalization. The book surveys existing evidence on the impact of programs worldwide that provide support to children during the period before birth through age six, including programs in developed and developing nations. It presents a compelling evidence-based argument for greater investment in ECD programs in Latin America and the Caribbean, while highlighting the need for both more rigorous evaluations and more accurate cost accounting of such programs. Improved evaluations and cost tracking will generate better data on how to effectively design, fund, and provide quality ECD programs to all children in the region, especially those from low-income families.
This review was prepared jointly by the World Bank Group and the World Food Programme (WFP), building on the comparative advantages of both organizations. It examines the evidence base for school ...feeding programs with the objective of better understanding how to develop and implement effective school feeding programs in two contexts: a productive safety net, as part of the response to the social shocks of the global food, fuel and financial crises, and a fiscally sustainable investment in human capital, as part of long-term global efforts to achieve Education for All and provide social protection to the poor.
Young children who have experienced early adversity are at risk for developing disorganized attachments. The efficacy of Attachment and Biobehavioral Catch-up (ABC), an intervention targeting ...nurturing care among parents identified as being at risk for neglecting their young children, was evaluated through a randomized clinical trial. Attachment quality was assessed in the Strange Situation for 120 children between 11.7 and 31.9 months of age (M = 19.1, SD = 5.5). Children in the ABC intervention showed significantly lower rates of disorganized attachment (32%) and higher rates of secure attachment (52%) relative to the control intervention (57% and 33%, respectively). These results support the efficacy of the ABC intervention in enhancing attachment quality among parents at high risk for maltreatment.
To describe how child maltreatment chronicity is related to negative outcomes in later childhood and early adulthood.
The study included 5994 low-income children from St Louis, including 3521 with ...child maltreatment reports, who were followed from 1993-1994 through 2009. Children were 1.5 to 11 years of age at sampling. Data include administrative and treatment records indicating substance abuse, mental health treatment, brain injury, sexually transmitted disease, suicide attempts, and violent delinquency before age 18 and child maltreatment perpetration, mental health treatment, or substance abuse in adulthood. Multivariate analysis controlled for potential confounders.
Child maltreatment chronicity predicted negative childhood outcomes in a linear fashion (eg, percentage with at least 1 negative outcome: no maltreatment = 29.7%, 1 report = 39.5%, 4 reports = 67.1%). Suicide attempts before age 18 showed the largest proportionate increase with repeated maltreatment (no report versus 4+ reports = +625%, P < .0001). The dose-response relationship was reduced once controls for other adverse child outcomes were added in multivariate models of child maltreatment perpetration and mental health issues. The relationship between adult substance abuse and maltreatment report history disappeared after controlling for adverse child outcomes.
Child maltreatment chronicity as measured by official reports is a robust indicator of future negative outcomes across a range of systems, but this relationship may desist for certain adult outcomes once childhood adverse events are controlled. Although primary and secondary prevention remain important approaches, this study suggests that enhanced tertiary prevention may pay high dividends across a range of medical and behavioral domains.
Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Waldfogel, Jane; Craigie, Terry-Ann; Brooks-Gunn, Jeanne
The Future of children,
09/2010, Letnik:
20, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
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Jane Waldfogel, Terry-Ann Craigie, and Jeanne Brooks-Gunn review recent studies that use data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study (FFCWS) to examine why children who grow up in ...single-mother and cohabiting families fare worse than children born into married-couple households. They also present findings from their own new research. Analysts have investigated five key pathways through which family structure might influence child well-being: parental resources, parental mental health, parental relationship quality, parenting quality, and father involvement. It is also important to consider the role of the selection of different types of men and women into different family types, as well as family stability. But analysts remain uncertain how each of these elements shapes children's outcomes. In addition to providing an overview of findings from other studies using FFCWS, Waldfogel, Craigie, and Brooks-Gunn report their own estimates of the effect of a consistently defined set of family structure and stability categories on cognitive, behavioral, and health outcomes of children in the FFCWS study at age five. The authors find that the links between fragile families and child outcomes are not uniform. Family instability, for example, seems to matter more than family structure for cognitive and health outcomes, whereas growing up with a single mother (whether that family structure is stable or unstable over time) seems to matter more than instability for behavior problems. Overall, their results are consistent with other research findings that children raised by stable single or cohabiting parents are at less risk than those raised by unstable single or cohabiting parents. The authors conclude by pointing to three types of policy reforms that could improve outcomes for children. The first is to reduce the share of children growing up in fragile families (for example, through reducing the rate of unwed births or promoting family stability among unwed parents). The second is to address the pathways that place such children at risk (for example, through boosting resources in single-parent homes or fostering father involvement in fragile families). The third is to address directly the risks these children face (for example, through high-quality early childhood education or home-visiting policies).
This article provides an overview and critical analysis of inquiries into historical institutional child abuse and examines their multiple functions and complex effects. The article takes a broadly ...international view but focuses primarily on Australia, the UK and Ireland, jurisdictions in which there have been major national inquiries. Drawing on sociological and other social science literature, it begins by considering the forms, functions, and purposes of inquiries. An overview of emergent concerns with institutional abuse in the 1980s and 1990s is then provided, followed by an examination of the response of many governments since that time in establishing inquiries. Key findings and recommendations are considered. The final sections of the article explore the evaluation of inquiries, both during their operation and in their aftermath. Policy change and legislative reform are discussed but the focus is on aspects often underplayed or overlooked, including an inquiry’s credibility, its role in processes of knowledge production, and the part it plays in producing social and cultural shifts. In the context of growing numbers of inquiries across Western democracies, including the Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, it is argued that grasping the complexity of the inquiry mechanism, with its inherent tensions and its multiple effects, is crucial to evaluating inquiry outcomes.
•Job loss increases risk for psychological and physical abuse during the pandemic.•Positive cognitive reframing mitigates risk of job loss on physical abuse.•Interventions targeting reframing may ...decrease risk for abuse during COVID-19.
Job loss resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic presents significant risk for child abuse. Protective factors, such as reframing coping, may mitigate the risk of job loss on child maltreatment.
The current study investigated factors associated with child maltreatment during the COVID-19 pandemic, including parental job loss, and whether cognitive reframing moderated associations between job loss and child maltreatment.
A community sample of 342 parents (62% mothers) of 4- to 10-year-olds (M = 7.38, SD = 2.01; 57.3% male) living in the United States completed online questionnaires regarding experiences with COVID-19, the Parent-Child Conflict Tactics Scale, and the Family Crisis Oriented Personal Evaluation Scales.
Two logistic regression analyses evaluated predictors of whether parents psychologically maltreated or physically abused their children during the pandemic controlling for maltreating history, parental depressive symptoms, financial stability, parent age, parent gender, child age, and child gender. Parents who lost their jobs (OR = 4.86, 95% CI 1.19, 19.91, p = .03), were more depressed (OR = 1.05, 95% CI 1.02, 1.08, p < .01), and previously psychologically maltreated their children (OR = 111.94, 95% CI 28.54, 439.01, p < .001) were more likely to psychologically maltreat during the pandemic. Regarding physical abuse, a significant interaction between job loss and reframing coping emerged (OR = 0.76, 95% CI 0.59, 0.99, p = .04). Among parents who lost their jobs, the probability of physical abuse decreased as reframing coping increased.
Job loss during the COVID-19 pandemic is a significant risk factor for child maltreatment. Reframing coping may be an important buffer of this association on physical abuse and presents implications for maltreatment prevention.
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