Search results

This research project was an inquiry into the experiences of Aboriginal women who have undertaken higher education degrees as mature-age students. The main focus of this research was to gain an insight as to why mature-age Aboriginal women enrolled in a higher education degrees and why they did not undertake this study straight from school or at a younger age.

This chapter is based around the method of narrative inquiry of auto-ethnographical and autobiographical methods.

This research has found that although there were many differences in the lives of these women. They had different educations, family lives and financial situations. There was, however, one key component and that was their communities and families as well as their responsibilities to those communities and future generations.

The implications of this review suggest that the future benefits of this research will be that the participants will be able to assist their communities to ensure that all women who wish to attend higher education have the support they need. The participants are now in a position due to their education to develop a further network of mature-age Aboriginal women who they can call on for assistance in their communities by way of information sessions and contacts within the university setting.

The more we, as Aboriginal women, are involved in education, the better our families and communities will be in regards to health. It is my belief that, if we as Aboriginal women can gain a good education we can provide a much better environment for our families and communities. In providing educational opportunities we then provide better employment prospects leading to the advancement of health and wellbeing for our families and communities.

The purpose of this paper is to explore ways in which children and young people are being positioned as change agents for families through school health promotion initiatives in New Zealand.

The paper maps and describes the kinds of policies and initiatives that directly or indirectly regard children as conduits of healthy eating and exercise messages/practices for families. Drawing on post-structural theoretical frameworks, it explores what these resources suggest in terms of how healthy families should live.

Families are positioned as central to school health promotion initiatives in New Zealand, especially in relation to obesity prevention policies and strategies. Children are further positioned as agents of change for families in many of the resources/policies/initiatives reviewed. They are represented as key transmitters and translators of school-based health knowledge and as capable of, and responsible for, helping their families eat well and exercise more.

While recognising children’s agency and capacity to translate health messages is a powerful and welcome message at one level, the author need to consider the implications of requiring children to convey health information, to judge their family practices and, at times, to be expected to change these. This may create anxiety, family division and expect too much of children.

The paper takes a novel post-structural perspective on a familiar health promotion issue. Given the proliferation of family-focussed health initiatives in New Zealand and elsewhere, this perspective may help us to explore, critique and understand more fully how children are expected to be engaged in these initiatives, and the potentially harmful implications of these expectations.

In this chapter, rephrasing Spivak's question into ‘can subaltern children speak?’, I reorient the research on China's gigantic population of children and youths in rural migrant families towards a critical interpretative approach. Based on life history and longitudinal ethnographic interview gathered with three cases, I unpack the multiple meanings migrants' children attach to mobility in their childhood experiences. First, despite emotional difficulties, children see their parents' out-migration more as a ‘mobility imperative’ than their abandonment of parental responsibilities, which should be contextualized in China's long-term urban-biased social policies and the resultant development gaps in rural and urban societies. Second, the seemingly ‘unstable’ and ‘flexible’ mobility patterns observed in migrant families should be understood in relation to a long-term family social mobility strategy to promote children's educational achievement and future attainment. The combination of absent class politics in an illiberal society with an enduring ideology of education-based meritocracy in Confucianism makes this strategy a culturally legitimate channel of social struggle for recognition and respect for the subaltern. Last, children in migrant families are active contributors to their families' everyday organization amidst mobilities through sharing care and household responsibilities, and developing temporal and mobility strategies to keep alive intergenerational exchanges and family togetherness. The study uncovers coexisting resilience and vulnerabilities of migrants' children in their ‘doing class’ in contemporary China. It also contributes insights into our understanding of the diversity of childhoods in Asian societies at the intersection of familyhood, class dynamics and cultural politics.

Purpose: Premarital cohabitation has increased dramatically in China in the last few decades. Past studies have suggested that education is positively associated with premarital cohabitation in China, but how this association changes over time when cohabitation grows from a marginal phenomenon to a popular choice remains unknown. This chapter investigates the changes in the association between education and premarital cohabitation among married individuals in post-reform China.

Design/methodology/approach: Using pooled data from the China Family Panel Studies (2010–2016), logistic regressions are carried out to compare the association between education and premarital cohabitation across three marriage cohorts: 1981–1992, 1993–2001, and 2002–2016.

Findings: Results show that opposite to trends in many Western countries, the positive association between education and premarital cohabitation has not decreased but instead strengthened over time in China. This trend is more consistent for women than men.

Research limitations/implications: The pathways through which education influences cohabitation have not been examined. Moreover, the scope of this research is limited to married individuals and does not include cohabiting experiences that do not lead to marriage. Future research may address this issue when such data become available.

Originality/value: This chapter for the first time examines how the association between education and premarital cohabitation changes over time across different marriage cohorts and whether the diffusion process has happened like what has been observed in Western countries. The findings suggest that China is developing different patterns and trends of demographic changes because of its unique institutional and cultural context.

Recently in China there has been a problem of “excessiveness of education”, i.e. parents′ education of their children exceeds certain limits. This is considered under three categories: (1) excessive attachment to children in daily life; (2) excessive care for children′s study; and (3) use of excessive regular methods. Category (1) can lead to priority being given to the child to the detriment of other family members and at extreme financial cost. Category (2): in addition to following school studies closely, parents often set extra‐curricular tests and studies for their children and work out “unrealistic objectives” which they expect their children to achieve. This exerts great pressure on the children and has even led to cases of suicide. In Category (3) children are taught at home pre‐school to the degree that they are well‐advanced in studies when they enter primary school. This has the negative effects that children are tired of study before they even attend school or are bored because they have already learned what they are now being taught. This continues throughout education with parents acting as “second teachers”. Excessive family education is seen to end in failure; producing negative influences on the development of children′s intelligence and personalities.

The contradictions of the transition period in Moldova promoted transformations of the structure and functions of the family. Today the term “family” is more extended, including new forms in comparison with previous generations. Under current conditions there is an increased need to understand family issues. The family is not considered as a separate cell and closed system; rather it represents a problem of national interests. Strengthening the family is important, but its realization is not easy. Problems have to be solved at the society and family level. At the society level, there is a need for systematic research on family issues, for development and implementation of family support strategy, family consultations, and family life educational programs for youth. At the family level, the focus needs to be on increasing the quality of relationships, developing a democratic style of childrearing, and restructuring the gender roles.

This chapter examines the life histories of selected teenage Filipino fathers relative to their experiences of dating, courtship, and the discovery, engagement, and experimentation with risk-taking behaviors such as smoking, drinking alcohol, and premarital sex. Using an interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA), this study conducts family genogram and in-depth semi-structured interviews among eight teenage fathers. In so doing, it interrogates the consequences of sexual behaviors to the well-being of their respective families of orientation as well as the future of their expected family of procreation. The chapter argues how the risks of teenage fatherhood in the Philippines are relatively mitigated by the general conservative culture of Filipino families and the Catholic sense of religious orientation that seems to provide resilience captured in three themed experiences of “natauhan” (realization), “pinangatawanan” (accountability), and “pinanindigan” (owning responsibility). Thus, this chapter unravels the voices of young Filipino teenage fathers who straddles, on the one hand, the risk of premarital sex and pregnancy, and on the other hand, the challenges of responsible parenthood. In conclusion, the chapter provides policy insights on sex education and gender equality training for the vulnerable Filipino youth in the country.

Topics concerned with key areas of personal life, like marriage, parenthood and personal relationships, occur in a wide range of subjects across the secondary school curriculum. What these topics are and, in particular, how teachers deal with them in the classroom has been studied in the course of a three‐year research project which has looked at school‐based education for parenthood. Over one hundred teachers representing ninety subjects in five schools identified aspects of their work as relevant to the theme of the research. On the basis of this, teachers were interviewed, usually more than once, in order to learn as much as possible about their perceptions of concepts like marriage, the family and parenthood, and their approach tho this area of their teaching.

We review the state of the literature concerning work–family conflict in the military, focusing on service members’ parenting roles and overall family and child well-being. This includes recognition that for many women service members, parenting considerations often arise long before a child is born, thereby further complicating work–family conflict considerations in regard to gender-specific conflict factors such as pregnancy, childbirth, postpartum, and breastfeeding. Subsequently, we consider more gender-invariant conflict factors, such as the nature of the work itself as causing conflict for the service member as parent (e.g., nontraditional hours, long separations, and child care challenges) as well as for the child (e.g., irregular contact with parent, fear for parent’s safety, and frequent relocations), and the ramifications of such conflict on service member and child well-being. Finally, we review formalized support resources that are in place to mitigate negative effects of such conflict, and make recommendations to facilitate progress in research and practice moving forward.