Thesis (M.A.)--Kent State University, 2009. / Title from PDF t.p. (viewed March 3, 2010). Advisor: Jeffrey Wattles. Keywords: Zen; Chan; Ch'an; Play; Koan; gongan; kung-an; kōan; Blue Cliff Record; Biyanlu; Pi yan lu; Hekiganroku; Wumenguan; Wu-men kuan; Mumonkan; Xuedou Qiongxian; Hsüeh-tou Ch'ung-hsien; Setchō Jūken; Yuanwu Keqin; Yuan-wu K'o-ch. Includes bibliographical references (p. 89-95).

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My research takes a social work perspective to investigate the concept of the child with ‘additional needs'. This concept arose out of the Labour Government's programme ‘Every Child Matters' (HM Government, 2003) which proposed that children's needs for support should be picked up at an earlier point by an integrated Children's Services consisting of social care, health and education. This would stop them from ‘falling through the net' of services. A focus on ‘additional needs' should mean that children in distress are helped at an early stage before problems became critical, improving the ‘well-being' of children and their families. The research has traced the cases of twelve children with ‘additional needs' through their contacts with Children's Services, using an interactionist methodology to interrogate the meaning-making between respondents. Further, following Hacking (2004), a Foucauldian approach to discourse allowed me investigate the discourses which shape formal diagnosis and categorization. Focusing on the ways that the child is positioned and perceived has allowed me to address the question of whose ‘need' is prioritized when the child enters the professional gaze. In doing so it has examined the role of formal and informal labels in constructing the child, the emotional content that goes into creating the ‘meaning-labels' of the child, and the ways that failures in knowing about the child affect the ways that a child becomes pictured. It concludes that in the shifting practices that make up Children's Services, the child with additional needs can become lost in the complex interaction between adult needs and emotions. The informal ‘meaning-labels' which arise out of this complexity often identify the child as carrying a ‘spoiled identity'. This can be carried through into practice with the child, including the processes of formal diagnosis and categorization. Adult emotions need to be managed better if children are to get fitting and timely help to allow them to thrive.

Nigerian families are overrepresented in child protection interventions in Greater London, drawing attention to cultural differences in childrearing practices. This research investigates the experiences of first-generation Nigerian immigrant parents regarding their management of childrearing issues, which are contextualised within a British child welfare polity and normative cultural milieu. The tension between Nigerian parents' childrearing worldviews and those attributed as ‘British' constitutes the central theme of this thesis. The study employs Bhaskar's (1998) critical realism as an epistemological and methodological paradigm, complemented by the use of Honneth's (1995) recognition theory as the principal substantive framework from which the findings are discussed. Qualitative data were collected from Nigerian parents living in Greater London through an internet blog, semi-structured interviews with 25 individuals, and two focus groups with four participants each. Template analysis was used to code and identify themes within the data. The project gives rise to a series of findings. The first is that most participants in the study wished to uphold certain childrearing practices from their backgrounds. Biographical accounts of their own upbringing in Nigeria revealed a picture of caregiving for children occurring within communal and codependent family relationships, which emphasised expectations of obedience and respectful behaviour from children. Participants' accounts of the physical chastisement of children present this discipline measure as both reasonable and not-so-reasonable. The problematic status of the physical chastisement of children in a British context is the focus of the second key finding of the study. Participants communicated a collective view that Nigerian parents were commonly understood within British society as harsh and controlling, a view attributed to social workers in particular, and other child safeguarding professionals (teachers, child protection police, health professionals) and traditional media producers in general. The defence or disavowal of physical chastisement appears to have become the focus both of immigrant identity practices and the host country's conditions of belonging and inclusion. A third finding was that parents were fearful in their dealings with child safeguarding professionals. Such fears were identified as linked to prior immigration experiences, xenophobia/racism within public discourses and activities, as well as ineffectual social work practices. Participants communicated the view that their values, knowledge, and experiences were not given proper consideration during child safeguarding interactions/interventions and that the challenges posed to the parent-child relationship by immigration were not acknowledged. Social workers and associated professionals were perceived as practicing in ways that could be described as not ‘culturally competent' (Bernard and Gupta, 2008, p.476). Participants experienced social workers as overly prescriptive and threatening. They viewed contact with social services with intense suspicion. A fourth finding was the respect expressed by participants for the British government's efforts to uphold the rights of children. An invitation to participants to share their strategies for managing tensions between Nigerian and British parenting values provided insights to how active/passive influences contribute to everyday strategies of parenting in a context of immigration. Drawing on recognition theory, the thesis offers a way of understanding these findings that recognises and makes sense of the dignity, resilience, fears, and aspirations conveyed by the research participants. The thesis argues for an approach that capitalises on shared values and acknowledges the strengths of Nigerian immigrants' parenting styles while promoting acceptable alternatives to practices that might have attracted child intervention. Recognition theory is offered to social work practice as a starting point for a strengths based approach to integration and wellbeing, suggesting that socio-political participation in the British child welfare polity would lead to an improvement in the confidence and wellbeing of these parents and their children. This conclusion has implications for British social work professionals and other authorities involved in child welfare policy and practice.

This thesis is an exploration of the tomboy figure across a range of literary and cinematic texts from the nineteenth century to the present day. The tomboy may seem to be a familiar cultural archetype, but my study also examines lesser-known, often marginalised aspects of the figure, with the intention of bringing to light new dimensions of tomboys and what they signify. Reaching beyond well-known stories, I have looked at tomboy representations outside the Eurocentric and North American versions, bringing in examples from the Caribbean, South America, Asia, and from within the postcolonial diaspora. Exploring these various hidden tomboy histories has meant engaging with work on how the tomboy figure might ask us to rethink settled notions of childhood gender identity, of the queer child, and the very concept of childhood itself as a queer temporality. Moving from a study of Wuthering Heights and nineteenth century children's fiction, I consider more recent tomboys in a small number of international films (drawing here on concepts of embodiment, materiality and the sensuous experience of cinema) before investigating how tomboy figures relate to questions of ethnic subjectivity in novels by Jamaica Kincaid and Catherine Johnson. By covering such a wide range of historical periods, genres and texts, the aim is to trace the complexities of the tomboy, a child figure that has always had strong connotations of gender transformation and gender rebellion, and is often associated with a playful and empowering otherness while conversely carrying with it the suggestion of reaffirming patriarchal, binary gender identities.

In the context of current fears about ‘toxic childhood', and a marketing industry's celebration of children as empowered by consumerism, this thesis asks where does this leave children themselves? Theoretically the thesis adopts a Foucauldian approach, with its understanding of the relations between power, knowledge and subjectivity and methodologically deploys a discourse analysis. The latter is used to scrutinise ‘the child' and consumption as understood by ‘experts' on the one hand and ‘marketing' on the other. For the ‘experts' the corpus for research is made up of a disparate set of populist and academic articles and books from the UK in 2007/2008, engaging with the ill effects of consumerism on children. Also included here is a transcript of the UK parliamentary debate on ‘junk food advertising' from 25th April 2008. For ‘marketing', materials were collected from one emblematic event: the annual British Toy and Hobby Association Toy Fair 2014, where marketing professionals promote their wares by ‘selling' the benefits of (toy) consumption for children. What emerges as a commonality from these two very different discourses is the child as ‘subject' (and ‘object'), placed in a homogeneous childhood. To investigate the authenticity of this construct, the third strand of research is focused on some children talking about consumption. Children from a local school, aged between nine and ten, were divided into focus groups of boys and girls, facilitated by a teacher but with the children able to discuss ideas relatively freely. This provides the final corpus of research for analysis. What the children's talk reveals is a distinctiveness in their interactions with each other and their teacher, in which they utilise their own ‘methods' – what I refer to as ‘dynamic bricolage' and ‘collaboration'. Through these they perform an ‘identity work' to resist or evade certain knowledges about them and create others to integrate into an individual and group ‘childhood' identity, which is relished by them as not-adult. I argue that these childhood practices complicate contemporary understandings of childhood: the child is neither innocent victim nor savvy consumer.

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The socio-emotional well-being of maltreated children is a key priority for practitioners and policy-makers alike; yet not enough is known about the developmental mechanisms that might link children's parenting experiences with their psychosocial adjustment. Previous research suggests that parental abuse and neglect can have adverse effects on children's peer relationships and self-perceptions. Emerging theoretical and empirical work suggests that children's social understanding and empathy could play a key role as mediators of these effects, but we have little knowledge about the differentiated pathways that might be uncovered by adopting a multidimensional conceptualisation of parenting experiences, social understanding and empathy, and peer reputations and self-perceptions. This thesis includes five papers reporting on a programme of empirical research conducted in order to address this gap in knowledge. The first, a meta-analysis and systematic review, revealed a complex and differentiated profile of social understanding among maltreated children. The second paper reports on a thematic analysis of a focus group and detailed semi-structured individual interviews with foster carers. In line with our theoretical model, carers readily identified children's difficulties with social understanding and empathy as relevant explanations for their socio-emotional problems. The third paper presents a new multidimensional self-report measure of empathy in children, demonstrating differentiated connections with socio-emotional functioning. The fourth paper presents comparisons between maltreated children in foster care and their classmates at school (aged 7-11 years), using measures that assess their peer reputations, self-perceptions, social understanding and empathy. Results indicate both direct links from maltreatment status to self-perceptions, as well as indirect links via children's theory of mind skills, their prosocial responses to others' emotional states and their behavioural reputations. The final paper delves deeper into the variations within the non-maltreated sample, uncovering links between specific features of the children's parenting experiences and their behavioural reputations, peer status and self-perceptions, via emotion understanding and empathic responses. Overall, the findings from this programme of research highlight the interplay of parenting experiences and socio-emotional competence in understanding school-aged children's psychosocial functioning. The results carry implications for further research as well as for applied work to support maltreated children and the adults who work with and care for them.

This thesis examined the influence of parents' gendered attitudes and behaviours on three different aspects of development in middle childhood and early adolescence through three papers. The first paper explored the longitudinal influence of parents' gender-role attitudes and division of household responsibilities on children's gender development. Results showed that parents' gender-role attitudes and division of household responsibilities were predictive of children's gendered personality traits, gender-role attitudes and feminine preferences for activities, but not their masculine preferences for activities. The second paper investigated the influence of parents' gender-role attitudes and division of household responsibilities on children's ability self-concepts. Parents' gendered attitudes and behaviours were not predictive of children's ability self-concepts. However, children's own gendered attitudes and behaviours were associated with these self-concepts. Children's higher feminine preferences predicted lower maths and sports self-concepts and higher English self-concepts. In addition, higher masculine preferences and personality traits predicted higher sports self-concepts. Finally, the third paper explored the influences of parents' gender-role attitudes and division of household responsibilities on sibling relationship quality, and marriage and parenting as mediators of this association, which is unique to the literature. Families with more egalitarian division of household responsibilities had more positive and less negative sibling relationships than traditional families. Using structural equation modelling, parenting, but not marriage was found to act as a mediator. Papers 1 and 2 used a longitudinal sample of 106 families with two siblings and their parents from the South East of England. Paper 3 used just the first wave of data from this study which included 124 families. This research highlights the importance of taking a family systems approach to examining child development, and emphasises the need to explore the father-child and sibling relationships in addition to the prevalent focus on mother-child relationships. In addition, multiple dimensions of gender were explored for parents and children rather than just examining sex differences. This added extra depth to the analysis and aided in understanding the complexity of these associations. The diverse nature of influences of parents' gendered attitudes and behaviours on these three areas allows comparisons to be made that contribute to the literature on parental influences and our understanding of child development in middle childhood and early adolescence.

The purpose of this study is to contribute to the development of integrated child welfare services through an exploration of how professionals providing such services make sense of children's rights and interpret their understandings in their approach to practice. The study focuses on professionals providing services for children between 5 and 13 years old within the Every Child Matters initiative, designed to support the assessment and provision of integrated child and family preventive services in England. The aims were to explore professional understandings of, and engagement with children's rights, provide a description and analysis of the empirical data, and develop a theorised understanding of the factors influencing sense-making and their implications for professionals' interpretations of their role. Areas of interest included similarities and differences in professionals' understandings and how these matched the understandings of service users and those evident in legal and policy texts. It was anticipated that professionals' understandings and engagement would draw on a complex mix of variable knowledge and embedded assumptions and practices, contested and negotiated in relation to welfare structures, texts and professional identities. The study was designed to explore whether this was borne out. A post-modernist theoretical approach was used, drawing on Bourdieu's theories of structured inequalities and influenced by Actor Network Theory's perspectives on networks. Using qualitative methodologies a case study was undertaken within one local area, linking a range of elements in an iterative process, with data from one phase interwoven in the next. Thirty-nine semi-structured interviews with professionals from social work, education and health settings drew on material developed from focus group discussions with child and parent service users and were supplemented by analysis of legal and policy texts and of 30 case records and site-based observations. Initial findings were discussed in parent and professional focus groups. In a second stage analysis of a subset of the data, these findings were explored further and situated within research and academic debate on professional practices and theories of childhood and of rights. Three broad configurations emerged from the data, reflecting differing professionals' constructions and practice interpretations of children's rights. Some participants interpreted children's rights as an essential ‘golden thread' underpinning their practice; others took a more selective ‘pick and mix' approach; and in a third perspective, children's rights were positioned as ‘uncomfortable accommodations' in relation to interpretations of professional role and of family life. These varying dispositions and related interpretations of professionals' regulated liberties were associated with perspectives on childhood, rights knowledge, professional setting, personal dispositions and relational practices. The findings are necessarily tentative and a causal relationship cannot be inferred. Three overarching themes emerged across these configurations. These related to: a common rights language and framework; children's longer-term welfare rights; and conceptualisations of the role of rights within relationships. The absence of a common rights framework to support professional and interprofessional discussions of children's rights was evident across all settings, as was a professional focus on the immediate and lack of attention to children's longer-term welfare, civil and social rights. Participants indicated that providing information about children's rights and exploring rights-based relationships in work with parents and carers was very rare and often avoided. The study proposes that in order to address children's rights in a more consistent and holistic way professionals need opportunities to explore theories of human and children's rights using a broad common framework such as the UNCRC. In integrating children's rights within professional practice increased attention is needed to children's longer-term welfare and development rights and to providing children and adults with information about, positive modelling of and opportunities to explore the place of rights in children's key relationships.