Strengthening the Child‐ and Youth‐Serving Workforce: Surveying the Landscape,Overcoming Challenges

This special issue addresses a neglected but important topic in our field: strengthening the child‐ and youth‐serving workforce. Investing in this workforce should be a national priority because considerable evidence has shown that investments in early childhood education and development, particularly in low‐resource contexts, that are reinforced through skills‐based programs in adolescence and adulthood, have beneficial impacts throughout life. Investing in quality child‐ and youth‐serving programs also has the additional benefit of creating a productive and capable future workforce. The editors and authors of the special issue should be commended for producing the first special issue on this topic in our field or in related fields, one that is long overdue. Articles in this issue survey the landscape of an amorphous and complex area of practice and research and describe key challenges for the field. In this commentary, I offer organizing frameworks to characterize the child‐ and youth‐serving workforce, note emerging issues when addressing specific challenges, and identify areas for future research.     

The role of early care and education in addressing early childhood trauma

Young children's experience of trauma is associated with a wide range of adverse events and circumstances, including abuse and neglect, domestic violence, loss of a parent, and community violence. Policymakers and practitioners are increasingly aware that trauma during the first few years of life is especially widespread, and there is growing interest in new ways to support these young children and their families. Many young children who experience trauma attend early care and education (ECE) programs, and these settings offer important opportunities to promote their well‐being. This paper examines strategies currently being implemented in ECE to address early childhood trauma. The paper first examines research on how trauma affects young children's development, ECE environments, and society. We then describe the unique needs of young, traumatized children and features of trauma‐informed care that can address their needs, along with emerging interventions and supports that can be incorporated into or linked with ECE settings as part of a trauma‐informed approach. We conclude with a discussion of future directions for ECE and trauma research, policy, and practice, bearing in mind both the promise of new approaches and a limited evidence base to date.     

Early family adversity,stability and consistency of institutional care and infant cognitive,language and motor development across the first six months of institutionalization

This study extends research on the effects of institutionalization—by examining the trajectories of cognitive, language and motor development of 64 Portuguese infants and toddlers across the first six months of institutionalization, while determining whether pre-institutional adversities and the stability and consistency of institutional care predict children’s development. At time of enrollment, 23.4%, 32.8% and 31.3% of the children were moderately to severely delayed, respectively, in their cognitive, linguistic and motor functioning. Developmental problems persisted after six months of institutionalization. The accumulation of early pre-institutional adversities predicted cognitive and motor limitations at admission to the institutions, but not variation in subsequent development. The stability and consistency of institutional care also failed to predict developmental growth and change. Children who had never lived with their families of origin showed a better language development at enrollment than their counterparts who had lived with their families of origin before institutionalization. Such advantage was followed by a deceleration in language growth after six months of institutional placement. Results are discussed in terms of short- vs. longer-term effects of institutionalization.     

When autobiographical memory begins

The authors review competing theories concerning the emergence and early development of autobiographical memory. It is argued that the differences between these accounts, although important, may be more apparent than real. The crux of these disagreements lies not in what processes are important, but rather, the role these different processes play in the emergence of autobiographical memory and the temporal primacy of these controlling variables. These differences are explored theoretically and then extant as well as new data are brought to bear on these issues. What emerges is a new, more inclusive, multifactorial framework that integrates the controlling variables from diverse perspectives providing a more complete account of the beginnings of autobiographical memory.     

Relations Between Emotion Regulation, Parenting, and Psychopathology in Young Maltreated Children in Out of Home Care

Young maltreated children, birth to three years, represent the age group with the highest rates of maltreatment in the United States (ACYF 2007). There are few studies to date that have investigated early childhood maltreatment and its effects on emotion regulatory processes and psychopathology. In response, the current investigation uses a dyadic assessment procedure to examine the relationship between parenting, emotion regulation, and symptoms of psychopathology among maltreating and non-maltreating parent–child interactions. The participants in this study were 123 children (66 maltreated and 57 nonmaltreated) from ages 1–3. Child and parent affect and child effortful control were observed during a parent–child interaction task. Symptoms of psychopathology were measured using the Child Behavior Checklist. The maltreated children exhibited more anger, more internalizing symptomatology, and less positive affect compared to non-maltreated children. Among maltreated children, emotion dysregulation was associated with internalizing symptomatology. Moreover, these data reveal parental positive affect was associated with lower child internalizing symptomatology and parental anger was associated with higher child internalizing symptomatology in the entire sample. This investigation offers evidence that emotion dysregulation subsequent to poor dyadic interactions is associated with early child maltreatment. These data suggest that maltreated children experience difficulties in emotion regulation which may be related to their higher levels of behavioral symptomatology.     

Distorting the Rule of Seriousness: Laughter, Death, and Friendship in the Zhuangzi

The main purpose of this article is to underline the crucial significance of laughter, a hitherto neglected matter in the study of the Zhuangzi. It aims to show that focusing on laughter is beneficial in order to achieve a more comprehensive understanding of some of the most philosophically relevant problems in the Zhuangzi since a careful analysis of the role of laughter may reveal a great deal of debate concerning such issues as life, death, friendship, social relations, and ritual in this text. This article discusses then the positive role that laughter plays in the Zhuangzi in contexts traditionally governed by the rules of seriousness, formality, and circumspection, from both an anthropological and a philosophical perspective.     

Improving psychological adjustment following a first episode of psychosis: A randomised controlled trial of cognitive therapy to reduce post psychotic trauma symptoms

There are few evaluated psychological interventions or theoretical approaches which are specifically aimed at reducing problems related to adjustment and adaptation following a first episode of psychosis. The present study tests the efficacy of a form of CBT (Cognitive Recovery Intervention; CRI) in reducing trauma, depression and low self esteem following a first episode of psychosis, in a single-blind randomised controlled trial. A total of 66 patients who had recently experienced a first episode of psychosis were randomly assigned to CRI or treatment as usual (TAU) and followed up at 6 and 12 months. People receiving CRI tended to have lower levels of post-intervention trauma symptoms and demonstrated greater improvement than those receiving TAU alone. This was especially the case at 6 months for those with high pre-treatment levels of trauma. There was, however, no advantage for the CRI group with regards to reduced depression or improved self esteem. In conclusion, CRI appears to be an effective intervention to help young people adapt to the traumatic aspects of a first episode of psychosis although further evaluation in a larger study is warranted.     

Does language about similarity play a role in fostering similarity comparison in children?

Commenting on perceptual similarities between objects stands out as an important linguistic achievement, one that may pave the way towards noticing and commenting on more abstract relational commonalities between objects. To explore whether having a conventional linguistic system is necessary for children to comment on different types of similarity comparisons, we observed four children who had not been exposed to usable linguistic input - deaf children whose hearing losses prevented them from learning spoken language and whose hearing parents had not exposed them to sign language. These children developed gesture systems that have language-like structure at many different levels. Here we ask whether the deaf children used their gestures to comment on similarity relations and, if so, which types of relations they expressed. We found that all four deaf children were able to use their gestures to express similarity comparisons (point to cat + point to tiger) resembling those conveyed by 40 hearing children in early gesture + speech combinations (cat + point to tiger). However, the two groups diverged at later ages. Hearing children, after acquiring the word like, shifted from primarily expressing global similarity (as in cat/tiger) to primarily expressing single-property similarity (as in crayon is brown like my hair). In contrast, the deaf children, lacking an explicit term for similarity, continued to primarily express global similarity. The findings underscore the robustness of similarity comparisons in human communication, but also highlight the importance of conventional terms for comparison as likely contributors to routinely expressing more focused similarity relations.     

Delinquent Development in Dutch Childhood Arrestees: Developmental Trajectories,Risk Factors and Co-morbidity with Adverse Outcomes during Adolescence

Heterogeneity of re-offending patterns was studied in a group of 287 male early onset offenders who were first arrested before age 12. By combining data on the frequency and severity of offending as registered by the police over a 5-year follow-up period, three delinquent trajectories were identified; low, escalating, and high level re-offenders. Predicting group membership by individual and environmental characteristics known to the police at the time of the first arrest proved difficult. Compared to low level re-offenders, escalators were older and more often came from disadvantaged neighborhoods. High level re-offenders were also older at onset, more often had a non-Western ethnic background, and initially committed more vandalism. Furthermore, at the first police encounter, the police reacted more severely towards those who later became high level re-offenders. Finally, high and escalating re-offenders more often had other adverse outcomes, such as criminal victimization and Child Welfare Agency involvement.