Children in the environment: Forest day-care centers

Some features of early child care are more prominent in Norway than in other countries, such as emphasis on the outdoor environment. Of general relevance and interest is the form of day care provided by forest day-care centers. Three ideas form the development of these centers placed in wild areas. First, throughout history, Norwegians have had a close attachment to nature and some parents want to provide their children with outdoor experiences at an early age. Second, urging children to play outdoors characterizes the image many parents have of a happy, healthy childhood. Third, provision of day care for children has always been restricted in western countries, forcing parents to invent types of service that can become part of an ecological system that promotes healthy development.

The forest day-care centers developed recently represent a supplement to the wide typology of child care in the 21st century. The article outlines the connections between these ideas in general European and western history and Norwegian history and presents debate and decisions about a question dating from the last half of the 1980s. It concludes that the forest day-care centers are perhaps only a modern form of the original kindergarten concept, which started in Europe and America as gardens for children not gardens of children.     

Breaking The Cycle Of Intergenerational Child Maltreatment: A Case For Active Efforts For Dependent Minor Parents And Their Children In State Custody

Dependent minor parents placed in foster care with their children often face significant hurdles. These parents are responsible to make caregiving decisions for their children, while they themselves fall under the caregiving responsibility of the state child welfare system. As such, dependent minor parents live in a “twilight zone” – they hold full parental rights, but limited rights as teenagers. For a number of reasons, the children of minor parents in foster care often come into state custody. When two generations are in foster care at the same time, states must balance the safety and best interests of the children with the rights of minor parents to care for their own children. Currently, the state child welfare system is only required to provide “reasonable efforts” to reunify parents with children when they have been removed from their care for abuse, neglect, or dependency. However, dependent minor parents in state custody often require more supportive services in order to successfully reunify with their children than in a typical child welfare case. This article places the circumstance just described in the context of dependent minor parents’ constitutionally protected rights, and advocates for a higher standard which would require states to provide “active efforts” to protect and preserve these young families.     

WINNING ESSAY: 1998 LAW SCHOOL ESSAY CONTEST

Courts are frequently confronted with children who, regardless of court orders, refuse to visit their noncustodial parents. This article examines the possible alternatives to holding a child, or parent, in contempt for such behavior. Furthermore, solutions and ideas that better serve the needs of children and parents in these highly volatile family situations will also be explored .     

Training Parents Reported for or at Risk for Child Abuse and Neglect to Identify and Treat Their Children's Illnesses

Parents at-risk or reported for child abuse or neglect may demonstrate deficits in infant and child health care skills, placing their children at greater risk for health problems. Research assistants, caseworkers, and a nurse provided health care skills training to parents at risk or reported for child abuse or neglect. A health reference guide and other training materials were validated by health care professionals. Training involved teaching parents to follow a series of steps to identify symptoms, use reference and record-keeping materials, determine the best form of treatment, and either treat the illness at home, consult a physician, or seek emergency treatment. Skill acquisition was assessed through observations of parent behavior in simulated health care scenarios. A series of multiple baselines across parents demonstrated effectiveness of this training in the context of these scenarios. Six out of seven parents met the 100% mastery criterion. All parents provided positive ratings of the content of the training program, the training strategies, and the counselors who provided training.     

Child and Adult Care Food Program: improved targeting of day care home reimbursements--Food and Consumer Service, USDA. Final rule

This final rule amends the Child and Adult Care Food Program regulations governing reimbursement for meals served in family day care homes by incorporating changes resulting from the Department's review of comments received on a January 7, 1997, interim rule. These changes and clarifications involve: The appropriate use of school and census data for making tier I day care home determinations; documentation requirements for tier I classifications; tier II day care home options for reimbursement, including use of child care vouchers; calculating claiming percentages/blended rates using attendance and enrollment lists; and procedures for verifying household applications of children enrolled in day care homes. This final rule also amends the National School Lunch Program regulations to facilitate tier I day care home determinations by requiring school food authorities to provide elementary school attendance area information to sponsoring organizations. These revisions implement in final form the provisions of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 to target higher CACFP reimbursements to low-income children and providers.     

CHILD‐FOCUSED AND CHILD‐INCLUSIVE DIVORCE MEDIATION: COMPARATIVE OUTCOMES FROM A PROSPECTIVE STUDY OF POSTSEPARATION ADJUSTMENT

This study compared outcomes over 1 year for two groups of separated parents, who attended two different forms of brief therapeutic mediation for entrenched parenting disputes. The two interventions each targeted psychological resolution of parental conflict, enhanced parental reflective function, and associated reduction of distress for their children. The child‐focused (CF) intervention actively supported parents to consider the needs of their children, but without any direct involvement of the children, while the child‐inclusive (CI) intervention incorporated separate consultation by a specialist with the children in each family, and consideration of their concerns with parents in the mediation forum. Repeated measures at baseline, 3 months, and 1 year postintervention explored changes over time and across treatments in conflict management, subjective distress, and relationship quality for all family members. Enduring reduction in levels of conflict and improved management of disputes, as reported by parents and children, occurred for both treatment groups in the year after mediation. The CI intervention had several impacts not evident in the other treatment group, related to relationship improvements and psychological well‐being. These effects were strongest for fathers and children. Agreements reached by the CI group were significantly more durable, and the parents in this group were half as likely to instigate new litigation over parenting matters in the year after mediation as were the CF parents. The article explores the potential of CI divorce mediation to not only safely include many children in family law matters related to them, but also to promote their developmental recovery from high‐conflict separation, through enhanced emotional availability of their parents.     

Ensuring Insurance for Foster Care: Requiring Foster Parents to Obtain Liability Insurance to Cover Harm Done to Foster Children in their Care

This Note proposes that all states should require that foster parents have liability insurance before children are placed in their care. This Note also proposes that the liability insurance needs to cover not just harm to third parties but also harm to the foster children through the negligent acts of the foster parents. This legislation will allow foster children to have standing to bring claims against their foster parents and insurance companies and give them a greater opportunity for recovery. Currently, the policies and statutes governing the policies in place do not cover all types of harm that can occur during the foster parent–child relationship. Certain policies leave children who are harmed by their foster parents’ negligence unable to recover any damages from the people who have harmed them. Because foster parents can be left to defend the actions themselves, they often become judgment proof due to their low income, leaving the children who are harmed with little chance of recovery.

Key Points for the Family Court Community:
• States need to require foster parents to obtain liability insurance, which covers harm done by the foster children to third parties, harm to the home, and any harm done to the child by the foster parents.

     

Contradictory interests: Work,parents, and offspring in early modern Holland

The consistory notes of the Dutch Reformed Church (1573–1700) reveal conflicts over work between parents and children during the early modern period. Two issues that caused particular tension were the labor experience of future sons-in-law and the division of household tasks. Parents' concerns about the financial position of their future son-in-law were sincere and realistic. Skills definitely bettered the new family's chances to survive financially. Children were not expected to take care of their destitute parents nor were parents obliged to support their poverty-stricken married children. Power struggles between children and stepparents also resulted in conflicts over work. After a widowed parent remarried, children and stepparents had to redefine their roles in the new situation. The child who had assumed responsibilities when a parent died resisted a stepparent who took over those tasks. Although the cases presented may not represent everyday interactions between parents and children, they do provide insights into how work caused problems between parents and older children.     

Contradictory interests: Work, parents, and offspring in early modern Holland

The consistory notes of the Dutch Reformed Church (1573–1700) reveal conflicts over work between parents and children during the early modern period. Two issues that caused particular tension were the labor experience of future sons-in-law and the division of household tasks. Parents' concerns about the financial position of their future son-in-law were sincere and realistic. Skills definitely bettered the new family's chances to survive financially. Children were not expected to take care of their destitute parents nor were parents obliged to support their poverty-stricken married children. Power struggles between children and stepparents also resulted in conflicts over work. After a widowed parent remarried, children and stepparents had to redefine their roles in the new situation. The child who had assumed responsibilities when a parent died resisted a stepparent who took over those tasks. Although the cases presented may not represent everyday interactions between parents and children, they do provide insights into how work caused problems between parents and older children.     

Punishing the Innocent: Children of Incarcerated and Detained Parents

Abstract

About 2 million minor children in the U.S. have at least one parent incarcerated for criminal offenses. There are about 33,000 undocumented persons detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in jails and federal detention centers around the country, and 79% of the minor children of these detainees are U.S. citizens. There are few government programs that measure and respond to the harm caused to these children by the incarceration and detention of their parents, and the negative effects on these children are largely ignored in public policy debates about incarceration and immigration detention. I argue that we have an obligation to these children based on (1) the special status of children, (2) the harm caused to children by the arrest, detention and incarceration of their parents, (3) current incarceration and detention policies even in the presence of alternatives that would, on balance, create less harm.     

Children’s and parents’ involvement in care order proceedings: a cross-national comparison of judicial decision-makers’ views and experiences

This paper presents the views of judicial decision-makers (n = 1794) in four child protection jurisdictions (England, Finland, Norway, and the USA (California)), about whether parents and children are provided with appropriate opportunities to participate in proceedings in their countries. Overall, the study found a high degree of agreement within and between the countries as regards the important conditions for parents’ and children´s involvement, although the four systems themselves are very different. There was less agreement about children’s involvement than parents’, and the court decision-makers from Norway and Finland were more likely to express doubts about this. Nevertheless, the main message from the judicial decision-makers is that they are relatively satisfied as to how parents’ and children´s involvement is handled in their countries. Whether or not this confidence is justified, the emphasis on achieving effective involvement of children and parents in court proceedings is likely to grow, with major implications for the workers, decision-makers and agencies involved.     

Lethal child neglect

The jurisdiction of the Hannover Institute of Legal Medicine recently experienced an unusually high incidence of lethal child neglect, with three cases in a 5-month period in 1999. Case 1: A girl received an inappropriate and inadequate diet of tea and oatmeal. The child was never breastfed, nor did it ever receive any other formula. The parents report the infant to have been healthy until she suddenly began projectile vomiting at the age of 13 weeks. For the next 3 days the infant was not able to maintain an adequate intake. The mother reports finding the child dead in its bed on the morning of the fourth day. Attempts by medical personnel to revive the child were unsuccessful. Case 2: A mother began spoon-feeding the infant puree on the fourth day of life, which according to the manufacturer's specifications is suitable for children between 4 and 8 months of age. At the age of 5 weeks, the infant was reported to have vomited half the just previously ingested meal, after which she took a nap. Some time later the parents observed the infant to be quite pale, however, assumed this was a result of sleep. When the mother finally did pick her up, the child was lifeless, and the parents brought her to the hospital. Medical personnel could however, only declare the infant dead, documenting a rectal temperature of 30 degrees C. Case 3: A 3.5-year-old girl died after her mother left the locked apartment and did not return for several weeks. The body of the child was found lying dressed on the floor in a state of advanced decay and mummification. Common findings in all three cases include lack of prenatal care, home birth without the help of a midwife, low socioeconomic status or maternal alcohol abuse, body weights below the 3rd percentile, extreme dehydration, fatty hepatic degeneration, thymic atrophy and signs of aspiration.     

Representation and participation in child care proceedings: what about the voice of the parents?

In Ireland, the Constitution guarantees very strong rights to parents and the family, and there has been a long and unfortunate history of failures to adequately protect children at risk. As a result, there has been much discussion in recent years about the need to improve legal mechanisms designed to protect the rights of children. By comparison, little attention has been given to establishing whether the theoretically strong rights of parents translate into strongly protected rights in practice. This paper presents new empirical evidence on the manner in which child care proceedings in Ireland balance the rights and interests of children and parents, including the rates at which orders are granted, the frequency of and conditions in which legal representation is provided, and the extent to which parents are able to actively participate in proceedings. A number of systemic issues are identified that restrict the capacity of the system to emphasise parental rights and hear the voice of parents to the extent that would be expected when looking at the legal provisions in isolation.     

Visit Coaching: Building on Family Strengths to Meet Children's Needs

Visits between children in foster care and their families often do not build on family strengths or help them demonstrate they can meet their children's safety and developmental needs. Visits can alienate parents, children, and foster parents, and the parent's grief, anger, and preoccupation with complying with court‐ordered treatment often obscure their children's needs. Visit coaching is an innovative approach that can replace parenting classes and office‐based visits with hands‐on guidance for families in meeting their children's needs. The visit coach, who may be their caseworker or a variety of other trained individuals, helps parents take charge of visits and demonstrate more responsiveness to each child.     

Anger, Child Behavior, and Family Distress: Further Evaluation of the Parental Anger Inventory

Presumably, anger is a common experience of parenting. Although practitioners and researchers recognize the role of anger in various parenting situations, objective and standardized measures of parental anger have been notably lacking in the field. This study examined the Parental Anger Inventory (PAI), a measure developed specifically to assess parental anger in response to child misbehavior. A diverse sample of 98 parents participated in the study, including (a) physically abusive or neglectful parents, or both, n = 44; (b) nonmaltreating clinic parents seeking assistance for child behavior problems, n = 24; and (c) nonmaltreating, non-help-seeking community parents, n = 30. Results support the internal consistency, temporal stability, and convergent validity of the PAI. Findings also demonstrate the PAI's potential utility when working with maltreating and help-seeking parents. Results highlight the importance of assessing parental anger toward children and support the use of the PAI in assessment, treatment, and research.     

Cognitive problem-solving training to improve the child-care judgment of child neglectful parents

Child neglect, the failure to adequately meet a youngster's care needs, is the most frequent form of child maltreatment reported to welfare authorities. However, there have been few empirical reports of treatment outcomes for adjudicated, child neglectful parents. In the current study, an initial assessment of three neglectful parents revealed substantial deficits in cognitive problem-solving skills related to child care judgment. Treatment, consisting of modeling, shaping, practice, and feedback was used to improve each parent's child care problem-solving skills in a multiple baseline design. Skill enhancement was also found for untrained (generalization) problem situations, and independent caseworker ratings of each family's functioning provided external validation of the intervention's clinical impact.     

Beyond adoption: Orphans and family strategies in pre-industrial France

There was no legal adoption of under-age children in France before 1923. After the collapse of the Roman Empire the customs of western European societies, including France, sought to find a new family framework for orphaned children and tried carefully to secure the transmission of the assets such children inherited. Relatives had duties towards the children, and the children in turn had to work and serve their substitute parents and to obey them. A child was a “person” in western Christian society as soon as he or she was baptized, and the parents were in charge. But an orphan or semi-orphan was controlled by a family council and his or her future was submitted to familial debate and was controlled by neighbors and relatives, often in front of public and judicial authorities. French society before the 1789 Revolution had devised numerous ways of meeting the needs of the many orphans created by the prevailing high mortality rate, and maternal or paternal kinship expressed itself in diverse ways in the lives of these children, according to the different regional cultures that in France strongly influenced the practice and modalities of family reproduction.     

Forgotten Children of Immigration and Family Law: How The Absence of Legal Aid Affects Children in the United States

The absence of government‐appointed legal counsel in immigration proceedings adversely affects large numbers of children in the United States. Children born in the United States to parents without citizenship status (U.S.‐born children of noncitizen parents or UCNP) are harmed by a parent's detention and removal. Unaccompanied alien children (UAC) who have entered the country without legal status are adversely affected by their own detention and removal. The possibility of obtaining relief from removal is drastically diminished by the lack of legal representation. Currently UAC and immigrant parents are not entitled to court‐appointed attorneys. Any meaningful change in immigration law, such as a federal statutory amendment to provide UAC and immigrant parents with government‐appointed counsel is unlikely due to the present political dissension in Congress regarding this issue. Because UAC and immigrant parents are not entitled to government‐funded legal representation, a pro bono legal service system has developed, but is unable to meet the present need adequately. For immigrant parents, this Note proposes the adoption of a statute to allow the appointment of court liaisons in family court proceedings. The court liaison is a nonattorney who is familiar with the processes of the family court and ensures that immigrant parents are fully informed regarding all pertinent family court proceedings. For UAC, this Note proposes an amendment to the William Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act to mandate the appointment of a child advocate to all UAC. The child advocate is not a lawyer, but works with the UAC's attorney to provide the child with legal representation and advocacy.

Key Points for the Family Court Community:
• UCNP confront the loss of parents to detention and removal. Children are condemned to limbo, torn between absent biological parents and placement in foster care.
• The recent surge in the number of UAC who enter the United States by crossing the border from Mexico has been described as a humanitarian crisis. These children often remain alone without legal protection, vulnerable to detention and removal.
• Ideally, UAC and the immigrant parents would be provided with government‐funded legal representation in immigration proceedings. In the absence of the federal statutory reform necessary to make that a reality, state statutory reform to allow for the provision of court liaison programs for immigrant parents and federal statutory reform to allow the appointment of child advocates for UAC can begin to offer children and families needed legal support and advocacy.

     

UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES OF BARGAINING FOR ADOPTION ASSISTANCE PAYMENTS

Families that adopt children who are in foster care may receive monthly adoption assistance payments to offset the cost of raising the adopted child. The amount of the adoption assistance payment is the subject of bargaining between the family and the child welfare authority. This article uses a bargaining model to highlight factors that, in addition to the expected costs of raising the child, might influence the outcome of bargaining over adoption assistance payments. Findings indicate that married parents who adopt children already in their care have an advantage in bargaining, and single women who adopt their kin or foster children have a disadvantage in bargaining.     

Long-Term Follow-Up of Young Children Placed in Foster Care: Subsequent Placements and Exposure to Family Violence

This study examined the quality or characteristics of permanent placements at 6 years of age for 254 children who had been removed from their homes prior to attaining 3.5 years of age (mean = 13 months). Although the primary objective when removing children is protection, subsequent permanent placements are prioritized by federal legislation with a stable family environment, especially one with the biological parent(s), being preferred. Three a priori comparisons (i.e., reunified vs. nonreunified, adopted vs. foster care, relative vs. nonrelative foster care) were conducted for caregiver and child reports of exposure to family violence. The results indicate that both reunified children and their parents report more family violence (witnessed and child victimization) than do nonreunified children and their caregivers. Adoptive parents did report that they used more minor violence in disciplining their children than did foster caregivers, but their children reported witnessing significantly less physical violence in the home. Recognizing that the development of children removed from their homes because of maltreatment is likely a function of both the maltreatment as well as the quality of subsequent family experiences (i.e., violence exposure), implications of the findings for determining placements are discussed.