Termination of parental rights conflicts: Small-group therapy with adolescent boys

Abstract

In the 1990s Children's Village, a residential treatment center, has been able to return fewer boys to their families of origin and has sought court-supported terminations of parental rights (TPRs). A clinically sound approach was formulated to support the boys during and after the TPR process. Coleaders conducted group therapy with small numbers (2, 4, 5) of boys aged 10 to 14 years. The task was to help them relinquish the parent as a discharge resource. Impact of the groups varied with the boys' ages and the presence or absence of an identified peer leader. An identified date for ending resulted in vigorous therapeutic work in the final meetings.     

Dropping out of school: A review of intervention programs

This article reviews the literature on dropout prevention for school-aged children. A review of dropout prevention programs identified in the literature highlights methodological concerns, with a discussion of design, sampling, statistical analysis, and implementation issues. The interventions employed with greatest frequency in the studies reviewed emphasized academic enhancement, psychosocial skill development, mentoring, and parent/teacher behavior management training. Programs that were academically oriented or those that were multi-component programs emerged with the most promising empirical base. However, at the present time, there is a lack of consistent and persuasive outcome evidence that meet Kratochwill and Stoiber's [Sch. Psychol. Q. 15 (2001) 233] criteria for empirically supported interventions. This deficiency leads to the conclusion that there is no one particular best practice or beneficial treatment currently available to address the problem of school dropout even though a number of intervention programs appear to hold promise. Implications for school psychologists include both practice and research applications.     

Child Abuse: parental rights and the interests of the child

ABSTRACT I criticise the 'liberal'view of the proper relationship between the family and State, namely that, although the interests of the child should be paramount, parents are entitled to rights of both privacy and autonomy which should be abrogated only when the child suffers a specifiable harm. I argue that the right to bear children is not absolute, and that it only grounds a right to rear upon an objectionable proprietarian picture of the child as owned by its producer. If natural parents have any rights to rear they derive from duties to bring their children into rational maturity where they can exercise rights for themselves. The presumption that natural parents are best suited to rear their own children should be discounted, as should the assumption that alternatives to natural parenting are unacceptably bad. I reject the suggestion that parents should be 'licensed'but argue for a much closer monitoring of the family. Familial privacy, which such monitoring breaches, is shown to have a culturally specific and, given the facts of abuse, dubious value. In conclusion, I briefly specify the forms of monitoring I approve.     

Termination of logic programs with imperfect information: applications and query procedure

A general logic programming framework allowing for the combination of several adjoint lattices of truth-values is presented. The language is sorted, enabling the combination of several reasoning forms in the same knowledge base. The contribution of the paper is two-fold: on the one hand, sufficient conditions guaranteeing termination of all queries for the fix-point semantics for a wide class of sorted multi-adjoint logic programs are presented and related to some well-known probability-based formalisms; in addition, we specify a general non-deterministic tabulation goal-oriented query procedure for sorted multi-adjoint logic programs over complete lattices. We prove its soundness and completeness as well as independence of the selection ordering. We apply the termination results to probabilistic and fuzzy logic programming languages, enabling the use of the tabulation proof procedure for query answering.     

The efficacy of postdivorce intervention programs for children: A meta-analytical review

Preventive postdivorce interventions aim to help children cope with divorce and promote their adjustment. Nevertheless, questions remain regarding the concrete outcomes of these interventions and the intervention characteristics that influence them. This meta-analysis of 30 studies analyzes the efficacy of postdivorce interventions on children's symptomatology, personal resources, and adaptation to divorce. Likewise, it explores whether the intervention impacts the putative mediators from the family context and whether the characteristics of the studies themselves also influence the results. Using a data set of N = 4344 individuals, 258 effect sizes were calculated. Random effects analyses evidenced the impact of the interventions on specific variables instead of on children's global adjustment. There were no significant effects on children's mental health outcomes, and none of these effects were qualified by the moderators that were examined. Preventive postdivorce interventions had significant effects, specifically on children's divorce adjustment and self-esteem. The study of the moderators found that the interventions were generally homogeneous, and only one of the 20 moderators examined had a significant effect. Based on children's age, the interventions had an impact on family functioning only when they involved younger children, but this result should be interpreted with caution due to the small sample of studies. This meta-analysis provides evidence of the relevance of postdivorce interventions to critical variables as well as information about the role of the intervention characteristics in the effects and makes suggestions for future research on divorce interventions that encompass both practical and empirical developments.     

Student volunteer social support and infant intervention: A case study

The emphases in infant mental health have been in the three areas of supporting the mother-infant dyad through education, psychotherapy to help parents resolve emotional conflicts that interfere with the parent-infant interaction, and support during the acute crisis that follows an abnormal birth. The case described herein involves a child with a genetic defect born to competent parents, a chronic stressful situation that does not fit these categories. It became apparent in the first few months after the birth that both the child and parents were in need of some help in coping with the situation. An intervention was designed to help provide both the necessary stimulation for the baby and the needed emotional support for the family, while it acknowledged their skill and competencies as parents. This was done through the help of college student volunteers, who assisted the mother in the home. Developmental data recorded at birth, 7 months, 12 months, and 39 months indicate that the child is severely multiply handicapped. Interview data with the parents at those times document their personal and family difficulties, the eventual resolution as a family in dealing with this problem, and the importance of the volunteer help during that process.     

Assessment of infant cry: acoustic cry analysis and parental perception

Infant crying signals distress to potential caretakers who can alleviate the aversive conditions that gave rise to the cry. The cry signal results from coordination among several brain regions that control respiration and vocal cord vibration from which the cry sounds are produced. Previous work has shown a relationship between acoustic characteristics of the cry and diagnoses related to neurological damage, SIDS, prematurity, medical conditions, and substance exposure during pregnancy. Thus, assessment of infant cry provides a window into the neurological and medical status of the infant. Assessment of infant cry is brief and noninvasive and requires recording equipment and a standardized stimulus to elicit a pain cry. The typical protocol involves 30 seconds of crying from a single application of the stimulus. The recorded cry is submitted to an automated computer analysis system that digitizes the cry and either presents a digital spectrogram of the cry or calculates measures of cry characteristics. The most common interpretation of cry measures is based on deviations from typical cry characteristics. Another approach evaluates the pattern across cry characteristics suggesting arousal or under-arousal or difficult temperament. Infants with abnormal cries should be referred for a full neurological evaluation. The second function of crying--to elicit caretaking--involves parent perception of the infant's needs. Typically, parents are sensitive to deviations in cry characteristics, but their perception can be altered by factors in themselves (e.g., depression) or in the context (e.g., culture). The potential for cry assessment is largely untapped. Infant crying and parental response is the first language of the new dyadic relationship. Deviations in the signal and/or misunderstanding the message can compromise infant care, parental effectiveness, and undermine the budding relationship. (c) 2005 Wiley-Liss, Inc. MRDD Research Reviews 2005;11:83-93.     

A new approach for training infant intervention specialists

This paper describes a new approach to training infant specialists. A joint Master's degree program, based in graduate schools of public health and education, emphasizes cross-disciplinary coursework in maternal and child health and special education. The program emphasizes the importance of forging crucial linkages among the different disciplines and agencies that care for handicapped and at-risk infants. The program emphasizes improved skills in assessing, planning, and intervening on behalf of infants at risk for developmental delays or with severe or multiple handicaps; the ability to work with families; and the ability to develop and appraise community resources.     

Termination in a work group: Four models of analysis and intervention

Four alternative models for understanding and consulting with work groups are presented. The major propositions of each model are summarized and then applied to the same case of work group functioning. The author is interested in the application of theory and especially how differing models focus upon the same or different group phenomena. The author advocates the importance of increased attention to the functioning of professional work groups as a means of improving training and the delivery of health services. However, such analysis should include the use of social science models as well as the more commonly employed understandings derived from an intrapsychic model of group behavior.The author wishes to thank Dr. Marvin Aronson, Dr. Nina Fieldsteel, Dr. Marcia Lawler and Dr. Bennett Roth for their encouragement and assistance during the development of this paper.     

Rights-talk Will Not Sort Out Child-abuse: comment on Archard on parental rights

ABSTRACT  Argument about Rights can be either purely formal or substantial—meant to affect conduct. These two functions, which need different kinds of support, often become confused. The source of much confusion is the idea that rights-language is an all-purpose 'moral theory' which is in competition with others such as Utilitarianism. Since these are not really rivals but complementary aspects of moral thinking—parts of it, both of which need to be used along with many others—attempts to establish one of them as sole ruler are doomed to incoherence. The ambition to deploy an all-purpose thought-system is distinct from the moral motivation to change the world, and the two aims inevitably interfere with one another. Among these 'moral theories', however, the language of rights is specially ill-suited for all-purpose use. This becomes plain when philosophers, taking its adequacy for granted, conduct moral argument in terms of it alone, as if it were obviously appropriate, without background discussion. Rights-language is of particularly limited use because it is simply the most competitive and litigious of such thought-systems. Its win-or-lose formula allows no more scope for doing justice to defeated claims than a lawcourt does. For the serious conflicts of value that underlie large moral problems, this is disastrous.     

Semantic aphasia: A neglected entity

Three cases of semantic aphasia are reported. Computerized brain tomography showed bilateral temporo-parieto-occipital junction hemorrhages in one patient, and left parieto-occipital junction infarctions in the other two patients. The auditory comprehension defect of the three patients was characterized by preserved understanding of single words and impaired understanding of grammatically complex constructions. It is suggested that this comprehension defect reflects an inability to fully grasp the meaning of words and grammatical constructions imbued with spatial or quasi-spatial significance. Each of the three patients showed a complex spatial disorder that included constructional apraxia, spatial agnosia, and elements of Gerstmann's syndrome. The aphasic as well as the spatial disorder of semantic aphasics may be manifestations of a common defect in the perception of spatial relationships produced by left temporo-parieto-occipital region damage.     

Early manifestations of childhood depression: influences of infant temperament and parental depressive symptoms

In this longitudinal study, 83 parents of infants between 3 and 12 months completed questionnaires assessing demographic information, infant temperament, and maternal depression. When these children were at least 18 months of age, parents completed follow‐up questionnaires assessing toddler temperament and depression‐like symptoms. We were primarily interested in the contributions of infant temperament and maternal depression to toddler depressive problems, and the analytic strategy involved controlling for toddler temperament in order to isolate the influence of infancy characteristics. The findings indicated that lower levels of infant regulatory capacity and greater severity of maternal depression were predictive of toddler depression‐like symptoms. Moderator effects of infant temperament were also examined, with the negative affectivity * maternal depression interaction emerging as significant. Follow‐up analyses indicated that the risk for early manifestations of depression was attenuated for children with lower negative affectivity in infancy and parents who reported lower levels of their own depressive symptoms; conversely, children exhibiting higher infant negative emotionality had higher levels of depression‐like symptoms as toddlers, regardless of their parents' level of depression. The present findings further suggest that parental depressive symptoms need not be ‘clinically significant’ to predict toddler affective problems. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Sexual asphyxia: A neglected area of study

Sexual asphyxia, a solitary autoerotic activity practiced almost exclusively by males, is examined in this paper. The self‐induced asphyxia may be either chemical or mechanical, and its purpose it to heighten the sexual pleasure. The practice of sexual asphyxia can result in death; however, many such deaths may erroneously be viewed as suicides or homicides as a result of the lack of knowledge of the practice. Sixteen sexual asphyxiai deaths, reported in Dade County (Miami), Florida, are examined in detail. These data confirm that practitioners are overwhelmingly young, white, middle‐class, unmarried males. When the practice is fatal among older practitioners, the data show that some complicating factor, such as the use of alcohol or other drugs, may have contributed to the accident. The most frequent method of inducing the asphyxia was simple hanging by rope and in most cases there was no indication nor suspicion of suicidal intent     

药物安全:不良反应及其监测

药品是疾病治疗的重要手段,如何发挥药品的最大疗效,降低其不良反应,一直是关注的热点问题.近年来,随着新药的不断上市,药物不良反应发生率呈上升趋势.针对这种情况,从如何认识、判定、预防、处理四个方面,对药物不良反应进行了分析,旨在使药物不良反应得到关注,使用药安全、有效.     

药物安全：不良反应及其监测

药品是疾病治疗的重要手段,如何发挥药品的最大疗效,降低其不良反应,一直是关注的热点问题。近年来,随着新药的不断上市,药物不良反应发生率呈上升趋势。针对这种情况,从如何认识、判定、预防、处理四个方面,对药物不良反应进行了分析,旨在使药物不良反应得到关注,使用药安全、有效。