Developing Together: Parents Meeting Children��s Developmental Imperatives

It is well known that the parent influences the child, but few realize how much the child changes the adult. This paper reports research that explored how adults change when they learn to nurture their child??s developmental needs. It also explores how empathy with the child impacts an adult??s ability to move through his or her own unresolved childhood issues into new meaning and relationships. Using qualitative methods and quantitative measures, the research captures perspectives of 20 parents about their own development from using child development principles. Analysis resulted in the identification of five themes: (a) cognitive development in perspective, differentiation from past ways, and new meaning-making; (b) emotional development of trust, empathy, and affective complexity; (c) personal agency of intentional effort and use of critical self-inquiry; (d) adult well-being; and (e) emergence of wisdom. More research is needed to determine the association between child development competence and adult development.     

Gender Differences in Parental Coping Following their Child's Death

The impact of the deaths of 19 children from malignancy on subsequent patterns of maternal and paternal coping styles was evaluated in a retrospective study of Dutch parents. The parents had been bereaved on average for 19 months. Parental coping was measured by the Utrecht Coping List which has comparable male and female norm groups. Coping styles differed significantly between the bereaved parents and their respective norm groups, particularly for parents bereaved for 18 months or less. The impact of the loss of a child, in terms of their parents' capacity to cope with everyday problems and events, would appear to affect mothers and fathers rather differently. But fathers and mothers who had been bereaved for more than 18 months were both closer to their comparable coping style norm groups than those bereaved for less than that time.     

The co‐construction of joint action between mothers and 2–4‐month‐old infants: the mother's role

The purpose of this longitudinal study was to describe object‐centred interactions between mothers and their 2–4‐month‐old infants, before and during the emergence of reaching and grasping movements. We hypothesized that when reaching movements emerge at around 3 months, mothers alternate between attention stimulation and reaching stimulation, before joint actions between mother and infant develop around objects. Twelve dyads were recorded when infants were 2 months, 3 months and 4 months. The interactive sessions lasted 5 min. Three age‐appropriate toys the infant could handle were available to the mother. A principal component analysis (PCA) was performed on verbal and non‐verbal maternal behaviours, motor infant behaviours and co‐occurrences of those behaviours. The developmental course of prehension in infants when playing with their mother follows similar pathways, as was described when they are observed alone. Mothers appeared to early scaffold prehension skills by verbal and non‐verbal means. Moreover, maternal behaviours change according to the infant's behaviour, and conversely, infant's behaviours influence maternal behaviours: mother plays first an active part in joint action, while later on, the infant achieves joint action when motor skills develop. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The relation between off-job recovery and job resources: person-level differences and day-level dynamics

It is well-known that recovery from work and job resources can counteract negative effects of high job demands, but less is known about how off-job recovery and job resources are related to each other. In this two-level daily diary study, 67 employees filled out daily surveys over the course of 8 days to examine this issue. Consistent with our expectations, multilevel analyses revealed that previous day’s detachment from work is positively related to the state of being recovered before going to work, and that the state of being recovered is positively related to one’s level of job resources. Moreover, the results indicated that both person-level differences and day-level dynamics play a role in these relations. Our study highlights the importance of recovering from work in the sense that it does not only help individuals by repairing negative strain effects but can also function as a catalyst in the activation of job resources.     

Empowering public service workers to face bystander conflict: Enhancing resources through a training intervention

Public service employees work in occupations that are accompanied with high psychosocial risks. Police, firefighters, and paramedics are increasingly being confronted with argumentative, conflicting bystanders that frustrate them in executing their task. We developed a resource‐enhancement intervention and tested its usefulness for securing employees’ effective functioning and well‐being in bystander conflict. In a simulation‐based pre‐test post‐test control group design, paramedics in the intervention condition received training about how to increase their resources in terms of conflict management efficacy, perspective taking, task support, and emotional support. For those in the control condition, no such training was provided. Comparing pre‐ and post‐test measures (n = 81) of the participants in the intervention and control groups, we found evidence that the intervention successfully increased employees’ resources over time. Moreover, we found considerable support for a positive link between these resources and employees’ affective well‐being and job dedication. Thus, our study suggests that a resource‐enhancing intervention can serve as an important means to protect public service employees against the deleterious effects of bystander conflict.

Practitioner points

• A resource‐enhancing intervention can protect public service employees against the deleterious effects of bystander conflict.
• Resources related to dealing with a hindering bystander, as well as resources facilitating the continuation of the primary task, are positively associated with employees’ affective well‐being, job dedication, and job performance.

     

From Disavowal and Murder to Liberty

In his (1909) paper, Introjection and Transference, Ferenczi puts forward the murder that, at the end, has to be inevitably repeated with the patient. This idea is particularly pertinent to patients who are victims of transgenerational traumas and their disavowal. The capacity to talk and even to think is paralyzed when a family history is made of emptiness, murder and madness. The case of an interminable analysis allows us to grasp how trauma and its disavowal are reenacted in the transference and in the countertransference. The patient comes to analysis searching for meaning in the face of something that could not be elaborated and remains meaningless. Interpretation and construction open the way to a process of historicization/subjectivation that is essential to access temporalization and to open up a future that might escape the repetition of a disavowed and timeless past.     

Understanding sustainability

Proposed solutions to sustainability often bring different economic sectors into conflict; when a sustainable solution for one sector is non-sustainable for another it creates what we call the dilemma of sustainability. A recent example took place in the Columbia Basin of the Pacific Northwest, involving competing notions of sustainability by fisheries and the energy industry. Taking up some ideas of Eger and Lyotard, we criticize the constructivist approach which treats large ecosystems as constructions and the process of resolving conflicts of sustainability as one solely consisting of negotiations involving the trading off of interests. We propose instead to treat such conflict resolution via a Gadamerian-inspired hermeneutics that sees different economic sectors as having different interpretations of sustainability and that aims at common understanding.     

Understanding sustainability

Proposed solutions to sustainability often bring different economic sectors into conflict; when a sustainable solution for one sector is non-sustainable for another it creates what we call the dilemma of sustainability. A recent example took place in the Columbia Basin of the Pacific Northwest, involving competing notions of sustainability by fisheries and the energy industry. Taking up some ideas of Eger and Lyotard, we criticize the constructivist approach which treats large ecosystems as constructions and the process of resolving conflicts of sustainability as one solely consisting of negotiations involving the trading off of interests. We propose instead to treat such conflict resolution via a Gadamerian-inspired hermeneutics that sees different economic sectors as having different interpretations of sustainability and that aims at common understanding.     

Parental coping with their child's death

The impact of the death of 19 children form malignancy on subsequent patterns of parental coping was evaluated in a retrospective study of 33 Dutch parents, who had been bereaved for 19 months on average. Parents who had lost older children were compared with those who had lost younger ones on the Utrecht Coping List, which has been compared with a Dutch norm group. Coping styles of the bereaved parents differed significantly from those of the norm group. These differences were associated with the poorer mental health of the bereaved group as a whole. Parents of older children coped less well than those of younger ones.     

Job crafting and extra-role behavior: The role of work engagement and flourishing

This study investigates whether crafting of job demands and resources relates positively to extra-role behavior (i.e. contextual performance and creativity) through work engagement and flourishing. We collected data from 294 employees and their supervisors regarding employees' contextual performance and creativity. Results show that seeking resources had a positive indirect relationship with contextual performance through work engagement, and with creativity through work engagement and flourishing. Reducing demands had negative indirect relationships with both contextual performance and creativity through work engagement. We conclude that particularly seeking resources has important implications for extra-role behavior and discuss the practical implications of these findings.