The purpose of this study was a comparative analysis of the perceptions of parents and caregivers concerning appropriate discipline of young children enrolled in child care. A questionnaire, the Parent and Caregiver Perceptions Concerning Appropriate Discipline for Young Children Enrolled in Child Care Questionnaire (PCPQ), was designed by the researcher. Through the use of a Likert scale, respondents indicated their agreement or disagreement with statements derived from various discipline philosophies. This survey was distributed to the parents and caregivers of young children enrolled in 17 licensed child care facilities throughout the state of Indiana. Of the total sample, 1,963 persons, respondents included 592 parents and 312 caregivers. Diverse ages and educational levels were represented. Females represented the largest group of respondents. While most of the parents were married, the caregivers were evenly divided between single and married. The mean response for caregiver teaching experience was 4.57 years. Factor analysis resulted in three factors with reliability coefficients above .65. Of the 40 items on the survey, only four were eliminated from further analysis due to a lack of reliability. Factor I included items related to the Need for Discipline, Factor II was related to the Need for Consistency, and Factor III was related to the Need for Authority. The mean score for each factor was computed. A multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) was conducted at the .05 level of significance.Results1. There was a difference in the perceptions of parents and caregivers concerning appropriate discipline of young children enrolled in child care. The hypothesis, there is no difference in the perceptions of parents and caregivers concerning appropriate discipline of young children enrolled in child care, was rejected, F(3,674) _ 4.58, R = .003.2. Univariate F-tests were conducted to determine if the independent variable (parent or caregiver) differed on all three dependent variables (Factors I, II, or III) or on just one. The difference was primarily in Factor II, The Need for Consistency, F(1,676) = 5.75, p = .017. Parents and caregivers had similar perceptions regarding Factor I; they agreed with the need for discipline. Parents and caregivers did not have similar perceptions regarding Factor II; parents agreed and caregivers more strongly agreed with the need for consistency. Regarding Factor III, they had similar perceptions in that they sometimes agreed and they sometimes disagreed with the need for authority. / Department of Elementary Education

Syftet med denna uppsats är att visa hur historien kring barnavården påverkat dagens sociala barnavård, vilka förändringar som har skett och vilka äldre syn- respektive arbetssätt som finns kvar. Vi vill även undersöka dagens intentioner med det sociala barnavårdsarbetet, finns det eventuella hinder som försvårar dessa? Uppsatsen inleds med en bakgrundsbeskrivning av socialtjänstens barnavårds historia, lagförändringar, förhållningssätt, etik och ungdomars röst. Detta mynnar sedan ut i hur det sociala arbetet ser ut idag med fokus på socialsekreterarnas arbete med barn, unga och deras familjer. Vi har använt oss av en kvalitativ ansats med semistrukturerade intervjuer där vi intervjuat tre socialsekreterare ifrån tre medelstora kommuner i södra delen av Stockholm. I vårt resultat och analysdel har vi använt oss av bakgrunden, tidigare forskning, teoretiska perspektiv samt vårt intervjumaterial. Studiens resultat visar att det i dagens sociala barnavårdsarbete fortfarande finns kategoriserande mallar för vad som är normalt och onormalt. Barns rättigheter har succesivt ökat och familjen har blivit viktigare i arbetet. Resultatet visar även att barns behov i centrum (BBIC) har lett till mer omfattande dokumentationer som tar mer tid från det behandlande arbetet. Nyexaminerade socialsekreterare med avsaknad av kompetens och erfarenhet leder till att rättssäkerheten, möten och behandling brister i kvalitet.

The author began her inquiry asking: where are the feminists in Child and Youth Care (CYC)? With the expertise of three self- identified feminist CYC practitioners, she explores their meaning making of feminist identities. Employing post structural and social constructivist lenses, punctuated by poetry, she and her consultants explore a wide range of feminist discourse including the performance, resistance and evolution of feminism, personally and professionally.

Appropriate long-term care arrangements for children whose birth families are unable or unwilling to raise them is one of the most critical issues confronting providers of children's social services. Knowing something of the longer term outcomes of different types of provision, the factors associated with differential outcomes and requirements for additional services will all assist in the development of practice and policy in this field. This document reports on a decade of publications arising from just such an applied programme of research, to which I have made a significant contribution in terms of research design, data collection, analysis of data and dissemination through both publication and other means. These publications represent a unique and original contribution to the field in terms of methodology and the analysis approach, the samples studied and the relevance of the findings to the policy and practice world. The majority of the publications focus on a sample of children placed for permanence during their middle childhoods, that is children placed between the ages of five and eleven years. This cohort was followed-up at one-and six-years after placement. Some of the findings from the early works were then explored in more depth in subsequent publications. The contribution to knowledge that is evidenced by these publications is reinforced by the use of longitudinal and prospective methods to address some of the weaknesses of previous work in this area. By focussing particularly on children placed during middle childhood, the works have added considerably to the knowledge base concerning permanent family placement for children. This is true not only in looking at disruption rates but also in terms of the factors associated with poorer outcomes among continuing placements in the short-and medium-term. In particular, several of the papers draw attention to the identification of what may prove to be a very important experience in the backgrounds of some looked after children -preferential rejection. This term has been coined to describe children who have been 'singled-out', within a sibling group, for negative attention from birth parents and who are alone in entering the care system. Although numbers were relatively small, the association between this experience and poor outcome in the later permanent placement was found to be highly significant, and held across time, within the samples studied. The papers, taken together, have also substantially informed the debate on likely support and intervention requirements of placed children and their new families and at least one of the selected publications has contributed specifically and significantly to government policy making.

This thesis reports on a study into the decision-making that takes place within the six monthly statutory review of the cases of children in the care or under the supervision of the Local Authority. The research had four aims: 1. To develop a typology of review decisions whereby decisions taken in reviews could be classified according to their salient features. 2. To ascertain the level of the subsequent implementation of the decisions taken in reviews and to consider what factors contribute to or hinder their implementation. 3. To identify the functions of statutory reviews and the perceptions of the members of social work teams of the functions appropriate to reviews. 4. To consider the role and the importance of statutory reviews within the context of overall child care practice. The empirical research was undertaken in three social work area offices within one local authority. Information was gathered from almost three hundred reviews. The researcher, having first read the case record, attended two consecutive six-monthly reviews on the child. The social workers involved in these reviews were questioned on their opinions on reviews in general and on each review attended. Those 'researched' reviews gave rise to almost nine hundred review decisions, which were analysed according to the typology of decisions, and the level of their subsequent implementation was assessed. This study was designed as a policy-orientated study. Hence the research is presented first, within the broad context of developments in child care policy since the war, and second, in relation to the literature on statutory sreviews arising both from research studies and from policy documents. Furthermore, the concluding chapter points to the policy implications that may be drawn from the research findings, together with suggestions for policy changes.

This thesis contributes to the fields of Public Economics and Development Economics by studying human capital formation under three scenarios. Each scenario is represented in an individual paper between Chapters 2 to 4 of this thesis. Chapter 2 examines the effect of child care financing, through human capital formation, on growth and welfare. There is an extensive literature on the benefits of child care affordability on labour market participation. The overall inference that can be drawn is that the availability and affordability of appropriate child care may enhance parental time spent outside the home in furthering their economic opportunities. In another front, the endogenous growth literature exemplifies the merits of subsidizing human capital in generating growth. Again, other contributions demonstrate the negative implications of taxes on the returns from human capital on long run growth and welfare. This paper assesses the long run welfare implications of child care subsidies financed by proportional income taxes when human capital serves as the engine of growth. More specifically, using an overlapping-generations framework (OLG) with endogenous labour choice, we study the implications of a distortionary wage income tax on growth and welfare. When the revenues from proportional income taxes are channelled towards improving economic opportunities for both work and schooling investments in the form of child care subsidies, long run physical and human capital stock may increase. A higher level of growth may ensue leading to higher welfare. Chapter 3 answers the question of how child care subsidization works in the interest of skill formation, and specifically, whether child care subsidization policies can work to the effect of human capital subsidies. Ample studies have highlighted the significance of early childhood learning through child care in determining the child’s longer-term outcomes. The general conclusion has been that the quality of life for a child, higher earnings during later life, as well as the contributions the child makes to society as an adult can be traced back to exposures during the first few years of life. Early childhood education obtained through child care has been found to play a pivotal role in the human capital base amongst children that can benefit them in the long run. Based on this premise, the paper develops a simple Overlapping Generations Model (OLG) to find out the implications of early learning on future investments in human capital. It is shown that higher costs of child care will reduce skill investments of parents. Also, for some positive child care cost, higher human capital obtained through early childhood education can induce further skill investments amongst individuals with a higher willingness to substitute consumption intertemporally. Finally, intervention that can internalize the intra-generational human capital externalities arising from parental time spent outside the home - for which care/early learning is required to be purchased for the child - can unambiguously lead to higher skill investments by all individuals. Chapter 3 therefore proposes policy intervention, such as child care subsidization, as the effect of such will be akin to a human capital subsidy. The objective of Chapter 4 is to understand the implications of inter-regional mobility on higher educational investments of individuals and to study in detail the impact of mobility on government spending for education under two particular scenarios – one in which human capital externalities are non-localized and spill over to other regions (e.g. in the form of R&D), and another in which the externalities are localized and remain within the region. It is shown that mobility enhances private investments in education, and all else equal, welfare should be higher with increased migration. The impacts on government educational expenditures are studied and some policy implications are drawn. In general, with non-localized externalities, all public expenditures decline under full-migration. Finally under localized externalities, the paper finds that governments will increase their financing of education to increasingly mobile individuals only when agglomeration benefits outweigh congestion costs from increases in regional population.

Outside school hours programs provide recreation, play and leisure-based programs for children aged 5 to 12 years in before- and after-school settings, and in the vacation periods. Over the past ten years, the number of programs has grown rapidly due to women’s increasing participation in the workforce. At the same time, critical changes for the operation and administration of Queensland outside school hours care services were occurring following the introduction of mandatory standards and quality assurance. This study is a critical ethnography investigating the circumstances for two Outside School Hours Care (OSHC) services located on school sites at this time of change. The services were responding to the introduced legislative and accreditation requirements, the burgeoning numbers of students in the programs, and the requirements by parents for care for their school-aged child. The findings of this study show the complexity of the dualities of purpose and the operational administration of OSHC services, an area that has been little identified and discussed to date. This study illuminated not only aspects of OSHC services, it provided an opportunity for the co-ordinators of the two OSHC services to reflect on the operational structures. As the majority of OSHC services in Queensland (and other Australian states) are located in school sites, a closer examination of the relationship between OSHC and schools provided insights into some issues concerning the sector. Habermas’ Theory of Communicative Action was used to investigate the state of affairs and analyse the consensual and coercion meaning-making that occurred in the interactions between the stakeholders, specifically between the OSHC coordinators and school principals. Critical ethnographic research techniques, including participant observations and semi-structured interviews, were used to investigate what appears below the surface of social existence in the OSHC settings. On the surface, the interactions between the coordinators and principals appeared congenial. However, the study found that the vulnerability of the OSHC services for alienation and marginalisation was linked to the lack of legitimacy and reduced sense of social membership endowed by the ambience of the school setting in which the services were located. The study found that the distorted communicative action that took place within the OSHC settings exhibited the pathologies of alienation, withdrawal of legitimation and lack of collective identity. Examining the relationships of the key stakeholders within the outside school hours care services offers conceptual understandings of existing institutional relationships and practices, This critical ethnography pinpoints sources of power and unease contributing to the concerns for the outside school hours sector and recommends ways to develop these programs.

This research reports on an observation study conducted in Adelaide, South Australia of how 12 educators working in six long day care centres spent their day when working in their care. Specifically the study sought to answer the following research questions: 1. How do educators spend their day in a long day care setting?-- 2. What is the quality of the interactions that occur between educators and children?-- 3. In what ways, if any, does an educator's qualifications and experience impact on the quality and frequency of interactions? / Thesis (MEducation)--University of South Australia, 2008.

Within the child protection system, children are separated from their parents in different ways and for different reasons. Family reunification following these separations, similarly occurs in a variety of ways and is experienced differently by those involved. / Through a qualitative design, this study gathered together a range of perspectives regarding the experiences, emotions and beliefs of those involved in family reunification. By interviewing parents, protective workers, caregivers, family support workers, family preservation workers, health workers and others, the researcher hoped to capture their wisdom and insight. Overall, 38 people were interviewed in relation to five examples of reunification. / Key concepts and categories were derived from the interviews in conjunction with descriptions of the cases. The researcher then developed a pathways tool which documented the journeys travelled through the process of reunification. / Although all the children in these examples of reunification returned to their parents’ care and were still there up to two years later, there were different opinions as to whether or not the reunification was successful, and what barriers hindered and what strategies led to success. The different definitions of success appeared to be greatly influenced by the participants’ assumptions and perspectives regarding the role of state intervention in the lives of families. / The findings in this research included a broader understanding of the emotional reactions of parents, caregivers and workers. The enormous sense of loss and other strong emotions felt by parents were often experienced prior to the children being removed, as well as during the separation itself. This therefore challenged the concept of filial deprivation being limited to physical separation of children from their parents and subsequently raised a number of practice issues. Many of the workers and caregivers also described feelings of powerlessness, lack of control and being confronted with limited options. Some of the workers, however, spoke of reunification as a more positive and fulfilling experience than other aspects of their work, even though it involved significant risk and difficult decisions. / The principles under lying reunification practice, as outlined in the literature, were evident in aspects of the cases to a varying extent. Opportunities for parents to be actively involved in their children’s placements ranged from no contact with the carer, to visiting almost every day and being actively involved in all decisions. There were some principles which were absent in all of the case examples, such as none of the children experienced continuity of care due to being in multiple placements. / There were descriptions of several service models involved at different times and stages along the families’ pathway through reunification, including different reunification programs. There did not appear to be any clarity regarding when a family would be referred to one type of service compared to another. There was also discussion regarding the influence of universal services, such as schools, on the family members’ experience of being included or isolated in each other’s lives. / Dilemmas and challenges which arose through reunification included those which were common to many fields in social work, such as clashes of values and beliefs and needing to make decisions between limited and inadequate options. Some of the complex issues particularly relating to reunification were the impact of the separation on children and parents, and the experience of being a ‘parentless child’ or a ‘childless parent’. This was an example of the meaning of an issue being subjective and as important as the factual information. / Some of the practice issues which arose through this study included: discussion regarding operationalising permanency planning principles rather than focussing on a parents’ rights or children’s rights dichotomy; developing a partnership perspective with parents, caregivers and workers; the importance of planning and preparation before reunification; whether to celebrate the day of home return or plan it to be as uneventful as possible; and the support and services required following the children’s return home. / There were also a number of recommendations made for future research which could further inform practice in working with children and their families through the process of reunification.

This thesis explores the effectiveness of a professional education model that was specifically developed for on-the-job training to assist seven child care trainees in six Child Care Centres in Queensland, Australia, to develop the competencies, motives, strategies and processes required to become expert educarers of pre-school age children. The intervention, which took place over 65 days, was implemented by six expert educarers who had previously been trained in using the Zone of Proximal Development (socio-cultural theory) to extend both the adult and the child learner’s development. The educarers were asked to assist the trainees’ demonstration of motives, strategies, and processes during daily activities, and the educarers and trainees were asked to assist the children’s demonstration of competencies in daily activities through the Zone of Proximal Development. As mass training for child care workers in group child care is still a relatively new phenomenon in Australia, and as little research has addressed both an adult and child learner’s demonstration of competencies in the workplace with a permanent work-based instructor interacting through the Zone of Proximal Development, qualitative and quantitative approaches to analysing the data were chosen. These approaches present both a descriptive and a measured analysis of the day-to-day operations in which the training occurred. The study aimed to generate substantive theoretical ideas by extending socio-cultural theory (Tharp & Gallimore, 1988) with Activity Theory (Leont’ev, 1979), Legitimate Peripheral Participation (LPP) (Lave & Wenger, 1991) and Cognitive Apprenticeship (Brown, Collins & Duguid, 1989). Data collection occurred through questionnaires at three periods of the study, through pre- and post-training Semantic Differentials, through the trainees’ daily journals and the professional tutors’ comments, and the educarers’ weekly and monthly reports. The study provides a triangulated perspective of two foci. The primary focus was on the changing relationship of the trainees with the educarers during the training programme, and whether this led to a converging understanding and the development of an evolving, mutual meaning structure. The perspectives are the trainees, the educarers, and their joint interactions. The personal experiences of the trainees as observers and participants in the day to day activities of the centre are interwoven with the modelling and assistance of the educarers and demonstration of the children. The results revealed that some of the trainees’ relationships with some of the educarers changed over three phases. These changes demonstrated that, in Phase I, the trainees observed and practiced activities under the supervision of the educarers who instructed them what to do and why, and discussed parents, as they started to develop a mutual meaning structure. Their relationship reflected that of a novice-expert. In Phase II the seven trainees acted independently, planning and implementing minor activities, still under the educarer’s supervision however. In this phase the educarers modelled, observed, and commented on the trainees’ performance, as an evolving mutual meaning structure that reflected an aspiring expert-expert relationship developed. Three trainees attained only Phase II, while the other four continued into Phase III. In Phase III, the four trainees planned and implemented major activities independently while the educarers observed and commented on their performance and engaged jointly in tasks. Their relationships, which evidenced a developing and evolving mutual meaning structure reflecting a converging understanding, became collaborative for one dyad, one educarer perceived the relationship was collaborative and the trainee perceived it to be an aspiring expert-expert, while the other two dyads demonstrated an expert-expert relationship. It appears that the trainees, who experienced education motives with various strategies and processes implemented by the educarers through the ZPD in the training programme, demonstrated the greatest change in the relationships. For these trainees the peripherality of participation changed from Phase I, operating at the outer peripherality of the child care practice to operating closer to the centre of the practice in Phase II. The four trainees who transitioned to the centre of the practice in Phase III experienced educarers who exhibited consistent motives with flexible strategies and processes combining a wide variety of interactions through the ZPD. Emerging from the data, a dominant authentic activity, and a secondary aspect of this study was classroom management in general and morally acceptable behaviour (MAB) in particular. The dominance of this activity reinforces Tharp and Gallimore’s (1988) finding that classroom management was the most stressful activity for first year teachers. The trainees’ appropriation of the motives, strategies and processes in episodes of morally acceptable behaviour as modelled by the educarers, showed, over the study, a convergence of understanding and the development of an evolving mutual meaning structure between the dyads. The second focus of the study provides a triangulated perspective on the changes in the relationship between the trainees and children during the training programme. The trainees’ and children’s demonstration of competencies in morally acceptable behaviour is also addressed in this section: the perspectives are the trainees, the educarers and joint trainee-child interactions. The results reveal that the trainees’ relationship with children changed over the three Phases of the training programme. With a minor focus on children in Phase I, the trainees observed and practiced implementing activities demonstrating a novice-novice relationship. In Phase II, increasing their focus on children, the trainees took responsibility in minor activities demonstrating an aspiring expert-novice relationship. However in Phase III, with a dominant focus on children, expert-novice relationships were apparent. The four competencies developed for trainees to facilitate the children’s demonstration of competencies in morally acceptable behaviour, discussing feelings and discussing actions, and showing verbal and non-verbal empathy, were acquired and used by the trainees who experienced education motives in the training programme, in Phases II and III. Concurrently, the children developed and increased their competencies in verbal and non-verbal acceptance of the interventions, and showed increased understanding of cause and effect and the ability to formulate hypotheses. Changes were also evidenced in the trainees’ conceptual understanding of educaring children as they integrated the concepts of discipline and control with three other essentials of educaring (caring, teaching and learning), into their conceptual understanding of educaring over the study. The development of an evolving, mutual meaning structure of the authentic activities that were practiced in the child care centres, showed a converging understanding was being established between educarers, trainees and children. There was also evidence of reciprocal assistance. Influence, assistance and teaching were not a one-way process. They did not flow in one direction only, from professional tutor to educarer to trainee to child. The child in turn influenced the trainee who influenced the educarer who influenced the professional tutor.