Thesis advisor: Bernard O'Brien / This study investigated the relationship between handling of differences in marriage and marital satisfaction during the childrearing stage of the family life cycle. The mediating effect of gender was also examined. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 1998. / Submitted to: Boston College. School of Education. / Discipline: Counseling, Developmental Psychology, and Research Methods.

This study investigated the relationship between the perceived externalizing behaviors of children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and oppositional defiant disorder (ODD) and the maladaptive childrearing beliefs of their parents. The study used archival survey data provided by Intervention Services, Inc., a community mental health center. Data from 338 families with a child diagnosed with ADHD or ODD were analyzed. The study used the Conners' Parent Behavior Rating Scale short version to measure the level of conduct problems, impulsivity, and hyperactivity of the children as perceived by the parents. The Adult-Adolescent Parenting Inventory was used to measure the degree of parental belief in the value of physical punishment and lack of empathy towards childrens needs. Both surveys were completed by the parent. Pearson product-moment correlational analyses were undertaken for the total sample and separately for each of four subsamples: 1) males, 2)females, 3)those with ADHD, and 4) those with ODD. The results provided only moderate support for a few of the hypothesized associations between child externalizing behaviors and parent childrearing beliefs. Significant but very modest correlations were found in the total sample, male sample, and ODD sample. The strongest correlation in each sample was between conduct problems and physical punishment. The most interesting finding of the research was the difference in results between the subsamples. For the participants in this study, males and those with a diagnosis of ODD showed a greater correlation between childrearing beliefs of parents and perceived externalizing behaviors than females and those with a diagnosis of ADHD. Future research could focus on the differences in patterns of correlations found between the subsamples.

This thesis is concerned with childrearing approach as one of the prime sites of the reproduction of social inequality. It adopts Bourdieu’s concept of habitus as a way of explaining how social structures are reproduced through childrearing approach, and it draws on Annette Lareau’s definition of the ‘concerted cultivation’ and ‘accomplishment of natural growth’ childrearing approaches (Lareau 2003). During the latter half of the 2000s, UK and Scottish government policy placed increasing emphasis on the importance of parenting and the early years of a child’s life as factors likely to have an impact on health, education and employment outcomes. Between 2005 and 2008 - the timeframe considered by this thesis - a number of policy initiatives emerged which were intended to support ‘better parenting’. Critics of these policy initiatives argue that what was presented as a model of good parenting was in essence a model of middle class parenting which misunderstood and devalued other parenting approaches. Lareau’s typology of childrearing approach is used as a means of situating the UK parenting policy discourse within a broader theoretical context and assessing critically the extent to which this policy discourse reflects childrearing approaches in Scotland. During this period, the policy areas of parenting and neighbourhood began increasingly to overlap in the UK, both through area-based family interventions such as Sure Start and through the central role given to parents in the drive towards community empowerment, greater collective efficacy and reduced anti-social behaviour. The analysis uses data from the ‘Growing up in Scotland’ (GUS) survey to ask whether ‘concerted cultivation’ and the ‘accomplishment of natural growth’ can be observed in the childrearing approaches of Scottish mothers; it assesses whether beliefs about collective efficacy and measures of neighbourhood deprivation are associated with childrearing approach; it explores whether mothers change their childrearing approach over time and considers what factors might influence changes in childrearing approach. Finally, the thesis examines links between a mother’s childrearing approach and her child’s behavioural development at entry to primary school. This thesis builds on previous research on childrearing approach by testing Lareau’s concepts on a quantitative sample of mothers in a different geographical locale and by exploring changes in childrearing approach longitudinally. The analysis presented considers childrearing approach both at the individual and aggregate level. A narrative analysis technique is used to construct biographies for four mothers using the quantitative data in GUS. The constructed biographies inform a discussion of the ways in which childrearing may be experienced and made sense of by the individual. Latent Class Analysis is then used to explore whether patterns of childrearing practice can be discerned in the GUS sample. A typology of four childrearing approaches is presented: two approaches correspond to Lareau’s typology and two further groups are observed: working mothers and socially isolated mothers. The analysis finds that social class differences do not fully explain childrearing approach in the GUS sample. Neighbourhood measures are not found to be associated with childrearing approach when socio-economic factors are controlled for. Changes in socio-economic status are associated with changes in childrearing approach; mothers who experience fewer changes in socio-economic position tend to be those who adopt a childrearing approach similar to ‘concerted cultivation’. The children of these mothers are more likely to display pro-social behaviours at entry to primary school than the children of other childrearing approaches; the children of mothers who adopt a childrearing approach akin to ‘the accomplishment of natural growth’ are more likely to display conduct problems at entry to primary school. The discussion concludes that family policy between 2005 and 2008 did not fully reflect the variety of childrearing approaches in Scotland, and that mothers whose circumstances and childrearing approach diverged from the policy model may not have been adequately supported.

This thesis investigates parent education literature produced in Australia in the inter-war years. This period saw the emergence of various organisations concerned to safeguard and protect the health and well-being of children. For example, infant health clinics were established in most states, kindergarten associations were active in promoting early childhood education, and the mental hygiene movement gained a foothold in Australia. These associations engaged in parent education activities and produced a growing volume of literature. This literature contained instructions relating to various aspects of child care. Initially, advice was directed towards the management of health, but increasingly, information was provided on guiding child behaviour. Although the care of children was the main focus of this literature, it had wider implications. Authors provided comment on the emotional structure of family life and the patterning of parent-child relationships. Importantly, this literature contained advice for parents in relation to the management of their own personal care and conduct. This thesis contends that these discourses can be explained in relation to long-term changes in the history of childhood and the family, which are connected to particular developments in the structuring of social life that Norbert Elias describes as the ‘civilizing process’. In particular, it is argued that the growing distance between children and adults, and the positioning of the family as the primary site for regulating, or ‘civilizing’ the behaviour of children, can help to explicate the increasing emphasis placed on parent education in the inter-war years. This thesis also demonstrates how an Eliasian analysis, which emphasises long-term unintended processes of change, provides an alternative to Marxist, feminist, and Foucaultian approaches that focus on social control.

Thesis advisor: David Quigley / Chiefly an effort in cultural, intellectual, and political history, this dissertation is concerned primarily with the American North between the 1830s and the 1860s. The study explores the critical connections that contemporaries drew between childrearing, the home, and the exercise and preservation of individual liberty in a rapidly changing United States. Before, during, and after the Civil War, Northerners celebrated the autonomy of American youngsters. But they did so with bated breath and furrowed brow. Leaving home—potentially a profound expression of personal autonomy for a young person—generated both encouragement and trepidation. Young people on their own, beyond the threshold of their families’ homes, outside the ambit of mothers and fathers: this appeared to contemporaries an intractable fact of life—and a perilous one. Of singular concern was temptation: a cunning, ruthless, and virulent force to which young people seemed highly, maybe uniquely, susceptible. To Northerners living through the nineteenth century’s tumultuous middle decades, temptation was a pressing problem; not least, it was a pressing political problem, a grave threat to individual liberty. Nineteenth-century Northerners, especially those of a Whiggish cast of mind, generally believed that the maintenance of liberty required that citizens follow the law, and they held parents, above all others, responsible for investing their children with respect for the law. But a freedom dependent on law-following alone, and on the formal power of the state that the law embodies, was not the freedom that all Northerners idealized. Many preferred that freedom be preserved less by officials acting upon individuals than by individuals acting upon themselves. From this perspective, young citizens were to emerge from their parents’ homes equipped not only to follow the law—that is, to be governed—but also to self-govern. This entailed, among other things, preparing young people to confront and overcome temptation, the enemy of self-governance. Drawing upon a wide array of sources, including periodicals, personal correspondence, popular literature, and Christian sermons, The Perfection of Government: Childrearing, Freedom, and Temptation illustrates how contemporaries harnessed the power of childrearing and home life to meet this formidable challenge. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2023. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: History.

No description available.

abstract: Raising future generations is a culturally diverse, universally technological human project. This research brought the everyday work of raising children into the domain of sustainability scholarship, by first proposing a model of childrearing as a globally distributed socio-technical system, and then exploring the model with participants in two nodes – an elementary and middle school, and a children’s museum. In the process, the research objective shifted towards using methods that were less academic and more relevant to childrearing agents. The focus on participatory survey data was abandoned, in favor of autoethnographic documentation of a long-term engagement with a third node of the system, a child welfare setting. This approach yielded unexpected findings that fit the proposed model, identified characteristics of a Zone of Mutual Oblivion (ZMO) that exists between childrearing and sustainability, and clarified ways in which people prioritize their own needs and responsibilities, the developmental needs of children, the potential needs and capacities of future generations, and the functional integrity of ecological systems. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Sustainability 2019

The purposes of this study are to examine the reported childrearing beliefs and practices of family day home caregivers, to examine the reported childrearing beliefs and practices of parents whose children are in a family day home, and to determine the congruency of the reported childrearing beliefs and practices between caregivers and parents. The childrearing beliefs and practices selected for the study are in the areas of discipline, sleeping, feeding-eating, toilet training, sex-role development, and selected home activities.

No description available.

Eight families with Japanese mothers and English-speaking fathers were followed from the 1990s to 2007 as they strove to raise their children as bilinguals. The issues that were investigated were: (1) the language environments afforded; (2) factors influencing family decisions in creating those language environments; and, (3) conclusions about the efficacy of different language environments for raising bilingual children. Parental sacrifice was evident. Some mothers suppressed their native Japanese language and culture as they tried to afford their children solid backgrounds in what they considered a high-prestige language (English), while some fathers changed jobs in order to spend more time at home. Some families also moved in order to be near desirable schools. An optimal English environment at home was the key to success. Fathers spent quality time with their children every day, reading English books, doing homework together, talking about school activities, and reading bedtime stories. Families provided children with many English videos, DVDs, and other audiovisual sources. Summer travel to the father's country for summer camps and other enjoyable activities, especially spending time with English-speaking cousins, promoted positive images of English language and culture. Mothers faced issues of identity, power relations, and gender roles. The mothers' own experiences of learning English played a crucial role in the choices they made in raising their children as bilinguals. Typically, power relations between husbands and wives were determined by the wives' self-perception of being subordinate to their husbands. The results indicated that different theories of bilingual child-raising, no matter how stringently followed, did not seem to matter; what mattered was balancing the time the child spent with each parent. Usually before parents expected it, the child's own identity asserted itself in the pursuit of particular language environments, and progress toward fluency was sometimes erratic, as in the case of one boy whose development in both languages appeared to be delayed but who later was viewed as having native-speaker proficiency in both languages. Overall, more important than any particular method or theory, sustained sincere efforts and flexibility can produce bilingual children. / CITE/Language Arts