Ni Pardo,Ni Prieto: The Influence of Parental Skin Color Messaging on Heterosexual Emerging Adult White-Hispanic Women's Dating Beliefs

The influence of Hispanic parental processes on daughters' intimate relationships have been widely studied in the psychology literature. However, although skin color values have been found to directly inform dating preferences, research examining the influence of parental skin color beliefs is non-existent. Thirty-four emerging adult Hispanic women participated in this qualitative study which examined their beliefs about parental skin color beliefs on dating preference decision-making processes. The study revealed that parents encouraged daughters to select partners with lighter skin. Significant differences between the ways parents and daughters constructed skin color meanings were noted, although daughters' potential partner skin color preferences were mixed. Results indicate that cultural competency training for clinicians should include understandings of meanings and values given to skin color. Therapeutic considerations for addressing skin color concerns with Hispanic female clients, including parental influences, within group differences and validation of skin color values, are addressed.     

Resistance to peer influence during adolescence: Proposing a sociocultural-developmental framework

Assumptions regarding the vulnerability of adolescents to peer influences permeate the academic and popular literatures, especially as explanations of adolescent risk taking. In developmentally-oriented research that has addressed age differences in peer resistance/conformity, a psychosocially-based account has prevailed which attributes higher resistance scores of older compared with younger adolescents to the development of autonomy and individuation. In this paper, we propose an alternative sociocultural-developmental framework for the study of peer resistances. Contributing to the framework are, first, sociocultural perspectives on resistance within cultural and feminist studies that have implications for peer resistance scholarship in their alternative conceptualization of person–context relations and the consequent reorientation of the nature of the questions as well as the methods appropriate for addressing these questions. We then draw on dialogical theory to extend these perspectives to a more comprehensive framework encompassing developing-persons-in-changing-contexts and illustrate the framework with a research example.     

Breadwinner and caregiver: A cross‐sectional analysis of children's and emerging adults’ visions of their future family roles

Participants were 150 school‐age boys and girls, 58 high school students, and 145 university students drawn from communities in the Southeastern United States. In this cross‐sectional study, family role attitudes and expectations were examined across development. Parental work traditionality (occupational prestige and traditionality, and employed hours) predicted daughters’ social role attitudes and plans for future family roles, such that daughters’ envisioned families resembled that of their parents. Sons’ and daughters’ own attitudes about adult family roles predicted their plans to work or stay home with their future children; however, mothers’ work traditionality predicted daughters’ future plans over and above daughters’ own attitudes. The only exception to this was in the case of university daughters, where university women's attitudes about social roles fully mediated this relationship. It may be that, as young women approach adulthood and the formation of families, they adjust their vision of their future self to match more closely their own attitudes about the caregiving role.     

Community and school choice: Geographies of care and responsibility

This paper draws on elements of critical discursive psychology in order to explore some of the issues and concerns raised by parents' responses to the policy and practice of school choice. Drawing on data from a group of mothers of diverse social class and racial backgrounds, this paper examines the dilemmas some mothers engage with in their role as chooser—reconciling competing rationalities for choosing or trying to manage contradictions. A central argument of this paper is that the policy and political context shaping the emergence of school choice in Britain has provisionally secured the development of certain trends in education—consumerism, individualism and competition. Alongside and coupled with this has been the veneration of a narrow utilitarian conception of parents as consumers of education services, defined as people who share the capacity and willingness to maximize the utility of their decisions in a rationally self‐interested way. This paper questions the value of this approach as a framing for understanding the aspirations, motivations and fantasies informing parents' school choice and highlights instead the ways in which some mothers articulate the importance of community in their decision‐making practices. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Therapeutic moments are the key: foster children give clues to their past experience of infant trauma and neglect

Foster parents often despair over the lack of information about the past experience of the children in their care, particularly with children who have experienced infant trauma and neglect. In the context of family therapy these unknowns pose both a challenge and an opportunity. The author proposes that foster children gives clues to their past experiences in therapeutic moments, which the therapist may recognize as a result of her own inner conversation. In conjunction with a sound theoretical knowledge of infant trauma and neglect, these moments have the capacity to open a dialogue in the relationships between therapist, child and foster family. This dialogical process offers an opportunity for the child's past experience of infant trauma and neglect to be expressed in silence, and the foster parent's present experience to be heard in stillness, opening for them a way to go on beyond the family therapy sessions.     

The Method of Levels of Abstraction in Pluralism and Governance of Dialogical Interaction

This paper deploys elements of the philosophy of information (PoI) in order to explore ideas of dialogical governance. Dialogue in the governance of contentious issues is at least partly a response to the recognition of pluralism among perspectives on various issues. This recognition is prevalent in the context of European governance. However, it is a first step to a better understanding of diverging opinion, rather than an end point. This paper argues that the PoI offers a fruitful path to follow up this first step. Specifically, PoI provides epistemological tools that can be used to clarify the meanings of terms and relevance of perspectives at issue in dialogical scenarios. Importantly, this approach revises the enlightenment view of the individual, offering a more nuanced and ultimately more accurate view of the self as internally complex. This represents a step beyond the status quo wherein these things are taken as unproblematic. This paper argues that PoI’s resources ought to feature as a methodological background to a reinvigorated dialogical governance paradigm. This method and these resources can inform an improved view of dialogical governance in Europe and, in their generality, beyond.     

Semiotic Regulation through Inhibitor Signs: Creating a Cycle of Rigid Meanings

This study aims to analyze the process of semiotic regulation in youth transition to adulthood from the perspectives of cultural developmental psychology and dialogical self theory. The focus is on the transformations that occur in youth’s self-system configurations during a critical developmental period. In this paper, we will advance the idea that semiotic regulation may lead to the construction of strong signs (i.e. those signs that bring rigidity to personal meaning systems)—and more specifically, of strong inhibitor signs—that block the emergence of alternative meanings, leading to rigidity in the self-system. We present a longitudinal case study of a young man who participated in a social project in Salvador, Bahia to illustrate the process. Data was collected through two rounds of in-depth interviews at ages 18 (1st round) and 21 (2nd round) years. Analysis followed a mapping of positions and counter-positions, as well as emerging tensions and their resolution over time and in different spheres of life (i.e. work, school, and family life). The idea is to show how negotiations of self-positions evolve and activate a mechanism of inhibition of hierarchical integration and construction of alternative future meanings, in which rigid meanings are created and do not allow for emergence of alternative life trajectories.     

Parent–offspring conflict over mate choice: An experimental study in China

Both parents and offspring have evolved mating preferences that enable them to select mates and children-in-law to maximize their inclusive fitness. The theory of parent–offspring conflict predicts that preferences for potential mates may differ between parents and offspring: individuals are expected to value biological quality more in their own mates than in their offspring's mates and to value investment potential more in their offspring's mates than in their own mates. We tested this hypothesis in China using a naturalistic ‘marriage market’ where parents actively search for marital partners for their offspring. Parents gather at a public park to advertise the characteristics of their adult children, looking for a potential son or daughter-in-law. We presented 589 parents and young adults from the city of Kunming (Yunnan, China) with hypothetical mating candidates varying in their levels of income (proxy for investment potential) and physical attractiveness (proxy for biological quality). We found some evidence of a parent–offspring conflict over mate choice, but only in the case of daughters, who evaluated physical attractiveness as more important than parents. We also found an effect of the mating candidate's sex, as physical attractiveness was deemed more valuable in a female potential mate by parents and offspring alike.     

Selected Factors Influencing School Choice Among the Seventh-day Adventist Population in Southwest Michigan

One of the most significant problems currently facing Adventist schools in North America is declining enrollment in Grades K-12. It was the purpose of this study to determine if a relationship exists between school choice and parental perception of selected factors in Southwest Michigan. The author uses multiple regression analysis to explore which of the select factors influenced parents to make choices on where to enroll their children in school between church schools and public schools. The study found that there was a significant relationship between parental school choice and parents' perception of spiritual value-based education, the cost of education, academic program, who influenced school choice, safety in school, and awareness. There was no significant relationship between parental school choice and parents' perception of social factors and school proximity.     

Ways to Bolster Resilience in Traumatized Clients: Implications for Psychotherapists

This study aims to further theoretical and clinical discussions regarding the therapy of psychosis from a dialogical perspective and to contribute to the contemporary research literature that works toward developing methods for studying the dialogical processes in therapy. Three videotaped sessions of a therapy with a heterosexual couple, in which both partners had psychotic experiences, were analyzed using the Dialogical Investigations of Happenings of Change, a method developed with an aim to capture the dialogical qualities of multiactor conversations. The analysis illustrated shifts in the dialogical characteristics of the conversation through the sessions and associated shifts in the clients’ positioning, toward increased agency, as well as enrichment of the narratives regarding their difficulties. The gradual development toward more dialogical conversations, evidenced mainly in increased sharing of dominance and therapist responsiveness and participation, seemed to facilitate the joint construction of new words and meanings, the expression of strong feelings, the narration of difficult experiences, and increased agency. The findings support the view that a client's sense of agency, which can be particularly impoverished in psychosis, can be reconstructed in the context of dialogue, in which clients have a central place in telling their story.     

Parental influence on children's self-estimated agressiveness

Parental influence on children's self-estimated aggressivences was measured with inventories. One hundred seventy-four adolescents (85 girls and 89 boys; mean age 13.6 years, SD 0.7) from a suburban school, known as prone to problems of aggression, served as subjects. The dependent variable aggresive personality was measured with the Buss-Durkee Hostility Inventory [J consult Psychol 21:343, 1974]. Parental influence was measured with scales specifically developed for the present research. the subjects estimated: 1) their emotional relation to each parent; and 2) their perception of how their parents a and b) behave when angry c) at home and d) with their peers. The results revealed clearly gender-specific efects: mothers and fathers affected sons and daughters differently. According to LISREL analyse, mother had a clearly stronger impact on sons, while fathers had a slightly stronger effect on daughters. In the case of fathers, hiting and alcohol abuse were, in addition to a negative emotional relationship, strong predictors of daughter's aggresivencess. However, aggressive fathers tended in general to get a counterreaction with their sons, leading to low aggressiveness with the same type of behavior in their case. Typical maternal predictors of children's aggressivencess were shouting and a negative emotional relationship. In the case of daughters, the former was a more important predictor than the latter, but in the case of sons, it was the other way around. Modeling effects were revealed: subjects imitated their parents' styles of behavior in anger, however, with different patterns at home and with peers. The results may be interpreted as support for both the cognitive learning and the frustration-aggression hypotheses as sources for aggressive behavior. © 1992 Wiley-Liss, Inc.     

‘Should I Circumcise My Daughter?’ Exploring Diversity and Ambivalence in Egyptian Parents' Social Representations of Female Circumcision

Female circumcision is still practiced in different parts of Egypt, impacting women's health and well‐being. Existing studies often portray parents' representations of the practice as positive and homogeneous, with little attention paid to the true diversity of views within a community. This study draws on social representations theory to highlight such nuances, while identifying the psychosocial factors that shape parents' decisions to circumcise or not circumcise their daughters. In‐depth interviews with 11 mothers and five fathers were conducted in rural communities in the Al Qalyoubeya and Benisweif governorates. Thematic analysis revealed the co‐existence of positive, negative and ambivalent representations of female circumcision amongst parents and within the individuals themselves. Although some parents positively represent female circumcision as ensuring the daughter's chastity, safeguarding her femininity and preserving community identity, they feel distress about its potential harms, such as pain, bleeding and terrifying experience on the daughter. Fathers further acknowledge its negative impact on marital sexual relationships. In some cases, parents challenge the ritual and refuse to circumcise their daughters. In light of a theory of change that emphasises the role of community dialogue in renegotiating health‐damaging social practices, along with evidence of diverse views amongst parents, this study argues that sensitively facilitated ‘community conversations’ might provide parents with opportunities to debate their opposing views and allow for the construction of health‐enabling social representations. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Parental involvement with adolescents' education: do daughters or sons get more help?

This research examined whether parents were involved differently with the education of their adolescent daughters and sons. The investigation used data from the National Education Longitudinal Study (NELS), which collected information from approximately 25,000 eighth-grade students. Several types of parental involvement were analyzed for gender differences, including school discussion, parent-school connection, parental expectations, parental attendance at school events, and three measures of parental supervision (checking homework, limiting television watching, and limiting going out with friends). The results showed that, net of students' grades, tests scores, and educational aspirations, parents helped daughters in some ways and sons in other ways. Generally, daughters experienced more parental involvement with their education than did sons. The findings are discussed in terms of parents' traditional socialization practices versus a shift in parental treatment in response to social trends.     

Parental involvement in competitive youth sport settings

ObjectivesBased on ecological systems theory [Bronfenbrenner, U. (2005). Making human beings human: Bioecological perspectives on human development. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage], the purpose of this study was to examine parents’ involvement in competitive youth sport settings.DesignData were collected through two distinct phases of fieldwork. Phase 1 involved longitudinal data collection with four families. Phase 2 involved observations of youth soccer settings.MethodData were collected from four families via individual interviews and audio-diaries and were supplemented through 120 h of observation. Data were transcribed verbatim and analyzed using grounded theory methodology.ResultsParents’ verbal reactions to their children's sport performance behaviors were placed on a continuum moving from more supportive to more controlling comments. These comments were categorized as praise/encouragement, performance contingent feedback, instruction, striking a balance, negative comments, and derogatory comments. Parents experienced empathy in that they perceived sharing the emotions their children felt in sport, and these emotions appeared to change in relation to dynamic game and contextual circumstances. Parents also thought that they possessed knowledge and expertise of sport, which they perceived enabled them to make comments to their children.ConclusionA series of reciprocal and bi-directional relationships were central to parents’ involvement in competitive youth sport.     

Parents' perceptions of their child's academic competencies construe their educational reality: Findings from a 9‐year longitudinal study

Academically and vocationally educated parents were asked to assess their child's academic competencies and motivation when the child was in preschool, then every 2 years till the end of the child's comprehensive school. It was found that the initial increasing trend in the parental attributions of competence stabilized and even turned downwards and that the education‐ and gender‐bound differences in the attributions, already manifest at the preschool stage, were still in evidence and had got more varied forms. It is suggested that parental perceptions of competencies are activated in a socially structured field of meanings and that highly educated parents construe their educational reality in terms of the social representation of natural giftedness.     

Emergence of representation in drawing: The relation between kinematic and referential aspects

To identify and characterize early instances in which children attribute meaning to their drawings, scribbles of 2- to 3-year-olds were examined from kinematic and representational perspectives. Scribbles were shown to be composed of smooth-inertial and angular-intentional curves, the former revealing a systematic relation between curvature and speed (the 2/ 3 power law). Children tended to attribute a-posteriori representational meanings (e.g., an airplane) to angular curves and nonrepresentational meanings (e.g., a line) to smooth curves, that they have just finished drawing. They did not do so with reference to scribbles drawn by peers, by themselves in the past, or by the experimenter who imitated their scribbling. Children's attribution of representational meanings increased with age. The phenomenon studied was discussed as a possible precursor of preplanned representational drawing, indicating the child's awareness of the symbolic function of a line—standing for itself and signifying a referent.     

The determinants of parents' beliefs about the intelligence their children: A study from Hong Kong

One hundred and ninety‐three Hong Kong parents (mean age 42.2 years) were given a structured interview / questionnaire concerning their own and their children's self‐estimated overall and multiple intelligence. Previous research suggested that males tend to give higher overall “g” estimates to their children and themselves than do females, as well as higher scores on mathematical and spatial intelligence (Furnham, 2001). Further, studies in the West suggest that parents think their children are significantly brighter than they are and that their sons are brighter than their daughters. Estimates were lower than those found in Western populations but, even so, males rated their own mathematical and spatial intelligence higher than did females. Hong Kong Chinese parents did not think their sons were brighter than their daughters. The seven multiple intelligences factored into three clear factors for self and children, and regressions indicated that it was “academic” intelligence (verbal, mathematical, spatial) that was most “g” loaded. The child's age and the self‐rated overall IQ of both the parents were the best predictors of the child's overall estimated IQ. Less than a third of the parents had taken an IQ test or believed they measured IQ very well. Those who were more likely to be better educated, had taken an IQ test, and believed intelligence was inherited were more likely to award themselves higher overall IQ scores. Results are compared with the British studies in the same area.     

Voluntary assent in biomedical research with adolescents: a comparison of parent and adolescent views

An informed consent and voluntary assent in biomedical research with adolescents is contingent on a variety of factors, including adolescent and parent perceptions of research risk, benefit, and decision-making autonomy. Thirty-seven adolescents with asthma and their parents evaluated a high or low aversion form of a pediatric asthma research vignette and provided an enrollment decision; their perceptions of family influence over the participation decision; and evaluations of risk, aversion, benefit, and burden of study procedures. Adolescents and their parents agreed on research participation decisions 74% of the time, yet both claimed ultimate responsibility for the participation decision. Both rated most study procedures as significantly more aversive than risky. Parents were more likely to rate aspects of the hypothetical study as beneficial and to provide higher risk ratings for procedures. Disagreements concerning research participation decisions and decision-making autonomy have implications for the exercise of voluntary assent in biomedical research.