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The aim of this study was to measure the level of challenges faced by novice teachers in South Africa. Findings suggest a need for professional development courses to upskill teachers with effective pedagogies that can incorporate the social and emotional components into teaching and learning.

This study applied a descriptive research methodology by administering a questionnaire to 143 novice teachers. The data analysis technique was the Rasch model.

The findings indicated high item and person reliability, with a good item fit and polarity values that are compatible with the Rasch model. The three major challenges identified are uninvolved parents, discipline problems and a lack of guidance and counselling. These challenges can be related to social and emotional learning (SEL) components.

The study used quantitative methods and discovered the challenges that novice teachers face. If the research uses a combination of qualitative methods, it will be possible to better identify the specific causes of the above three challenges of novice teachers.

Due to the complex nature of South African society, many novice teachers are overwhelmed by the challenges they face when entering the profession. These challenges are often embedded in societal risk factors, which complicate the transition from student teacher to novice teacher. The major challenges identified in this study can be related to SEL components, as the challenges are closely linked to the psychological and social backgrounds of the students. Teachers in this study indicated that they found it difficult to deal with these challenges at the beginning of their careers.

By identifying the challenges facing new teachers in South Africa, they will be better prepared for their work in schools. Therefore, they will improve the above situation to continue developing professionally.

The findings indicated high item and person reliability, with a good item fit and polarity values that are compatible with the Rasch model. Teachers in this study indicated that they found it difficult to deal with these challenges in the beginning of their careers. Professional development courses are suggested to help teachers deal with issues such as discipline, uninvolved parents and guidance and counselling effectively. Higher education programmes should also include these topics in their curricula for student teachers. A greater emphasis on training teachers in their pastoral roles is suggested.

The purpose of this paper is to inform the reader about the currently employed theories, research, and interventions in developmental criminology, with a particular emphasis on parental influences.

As well as evoking the classical theories and relevant research in psychology and developmental criminology fields, some of the significant recent contributions are also evaluated to reveal how parenting is linked to youngsters’ delinquency in the extant literature.

While parental factors do not directly affect delinquency of children and adolescents, it is an effectual mediator.

Not a systematic (statistical) review, rather a hermeneutic one with righteous justifications.

Evidence-based suggestions, regarding the allocation of time and resources for the modification of implicated parenting factors in planning preventative and interventional programs, are made.

This review is an up-to-date instructional source that presents the major developmental criminology theories including the recent ones.

Mothers – The Silent supporters focus on the potential role of the mother in the restorative justice (RJ) process. This chapter provides a contextual framework for the research highlighting debates pertaining to RJ and parents, especially mothers. This was made possible with a grant from the BA/Leverhulme Small Research Grants. The research provided a holistic understanding of social backgrounds and links between theory and the practice of RJ. The workshop provided a multi-perspective analysis of the interactions within significant relationships between mothers and sons. The author’s focus was on the role of the mother prior to the RJ process. The workshops were held in a safe space in a northern region. The mothers were from different economic and social backgrounds.

The majority of previous studies on parental feeding practices have focused on the effect of controlling feeding strategies on child eating and weight (i.e. parental influence on children). The present study turns the arrow in the opposite direction, and it aims to test a child-responsive model by exploring the process in which child weight status might influence parental feeding practices, addressing potential mediating effects of parental concern for child weight (i.e. child influence on parents).

A cross-sectional survey was performed among parents of 10- to 12-year olds (n = 963). The survey questionnaire included measures of parental feeding practices and parents’ reports of child weight and height. Stepwise regressions were performed to reveal potential mediating effects of parental concern for child weight status on the associations between child BMI and a wide range of parental feeding practices.

Our results suggest a mediating effect of parental concern for child overweight on the associations between child body mass index and controlling feeding practices such as restriction for weight and health purposes and responsibility for determining child portion sizes.

This study provides an extension of previous research on parental feeding–child weight relationship. It includes a wider spectrum of feeding variables, and integrates parental concern for both child who is overweight and child who is underweight as potential mediators of the associations between child weight and parental feeding practices. Moreover, it has its focus on preadolescent children, while previous studies have focused on infants and young children.

While scholars recognize that parent engagement in children’s education is beneficial, much of the normative parent involvement literature rests on the assumption that marginalized parents of color must be taught white middle-class norms of conduct in order to engage with the school system. In this chapter, we describe the ways our critical ethnographic implementation and analysis of the Parent Mentor Program – a parent engagement project in a small urban school district in Central New York – re-envisions parent engagement in three interrelated ways. First, we argue that the project is race-, class-, gender-, and power-conscious, drawing on the interrelated theoretical frames of Critical Race Theory and Critical Whiteness Studies. Second, we argue that the program and research are unique in utilizing the toolkit of critical ethnography to not merely describe, but also to intervene in educational inequity. Third, we argue that the program has a more holistic goal than much of the parent engagement literature, as it seeks to connect parent engagement and activism with the larger antiracist goal of using restorative justice strategies to disrupt the disproportionate disciplining of Black students. Focusing on critical ethnographic methods in practice, we analyze the shifting positionalities of a multiracial research team as we grappled with methodological dilemmas in the first three years of the program. We document how we balanced the goals of introducing a race-conscious framework and catalyzing critical consciousness with the realities of constantly renegotiating entry in a school district characterized by colorblindness and colormuteness.

School is an institution that provides an opportunity to improve children’s equity and wellbeing and to bridge the potential disadvantage related to ethnic- or language-minority backgrounds. Information sharing between immigrant homes and school can enhance school achievement, support positive identity formation and provide early support when needed. In this paper, the perspectives of immigrant parents, school welfare personnel and school-going adolescents are analysed in order to understand how they see their respective roles in information flows between home and school. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

The data consist of qualitative group and individual interviews of 34 representatives of school personnel, 13 immigrant parents and 81 young people who have experienced immigration, in the metropolitan area of Helsinki, Finland.

Despite general goodwill, school personnel may fail to secure the flow of information. Due to structural power imbalance, school personnel are often incapable of engaging the parents in dialogical discourse. Young people of immigrant background in turn try to manipulate the information flow in order to protect their family and ethnic group and to cope with pressures from parents. The patterns of information flows in school as a social field reproduce immigrant homes as subaltern. Adolescents act in a strategically important juncture of information flows between immigrant home and school, which indicates that home-school interaction is actually a triad.

Awareness building among school personnel is vital for equity and wellbeing of children of immigrant families.

This triangulated analysis of patterned information flows in school as a social field provides a fresh perspective to those working with children of immigrant families.

This study aims to explore the family experiences of delinquent adolescents and uses a descriptive phenomenological research design.

The study explores the family experiences of delinquent adolescents and uses a descriptive phenomenological research design. Eight adolescents that were under detainment in a rehabilitation centre in Malaysia participated in the study. Data were gathered through semi-structured interviews and reflective journals.

Five themes common to the participants’ experience were inductively identified from the analysis. These were: life without guidance, alienation and isolation, conflict on how the family is managed; I am still a little child and prisoners at home.

Despite many studies on delinquent adolescents were conducted in Malaysia, no study has been conducted so far to explore and understand the experience of female adolescents in their families.

This qualitative study focused on how girls' high school coaches in the United States Southwest thought about Latina teens' participation in school sports. Semi-structured interviews with coaches (4 women, 11 men) indicated they continue to rely on cultural (deficit) discourses implicating girls' families and culture when discussing Latina teens' sports participation. Coaches suggested that Latina teens' parents do not see the value of sports for girls, do not view sports as a pathway to college, are not involved or interested in their daughters' participation for cultural reasons, and are overly productive. These conceptualizations shape coaches' recruitment and pedagogical strategies within school sports contexts. More critical reflections could aid coaches and schools in developing more adaptive school contexts and strategies to better meet the needs of Latina teens and their families.

The paper aims to examine to what extent and why parental involvement as well as characteristics of ethnic school population influence social skills scores (social position, behavioural skills) of students.

The study used the COOL5-18 database (2010) that included 553 Dutch primary schools and nearly 38,000 students in Grades two, five and eight (aged approximately 5, 8, 11, respectively). Multilevel regression analyses were used for analysis.

The findings indicate that parental involvement has a positive impact on the social skills scores of the students; behavioural skill scores are higher in ethnically homogeneous schools and lower in schools with a high share of non-Western ethnic minority students. There is no impact of characteristics of school population composition on social position scores.

A possible disadvantage is the way in which social skills and parental involvement were measured. These measurements are possibly negatively influenced by the teacher’s judgement of the language skills of the parents.

Existing research focuses on the impact of parental involvement and the composition of ethnic school population on cognitive skills. This study shows that parental involvement has a positive impact on social skills. This study also shows that in schools with a homogeneous ethnic composition or a high share of native Dutch children, behavioural skills scores are higher, but social position scores are not impacted.