Is Mindful Parenting Associated with Adolescents’ Well-being in Early and Middle/Late Adolescence? The Mediating Role of Adolescents’ Attachment Representations,Self-Compassion and Mindfulness

There is some evidence that mindful parenting, a parenting approach that involves the practice of bringing mindful awareness to the parent-child relationship, is associated with several positive psychosocial outcomes in adolescents. However, only a few studies have investigated the mechanisms that may underlie that association. This study explores whether the link between mindful parenting and adolescents’ well-being is mediated by adolescents’ attachment representations, self-compassion and mindfulness skills. The sample comprised 563 parent-child dyads (95.6% mothers). Adolescents (61.5% girls) had a mean age of 14.26 years (SD?=?1.66, range?=?12–20). Parents completed a measure of mindful parenting, and adolescents completed measures of attachment representations, self-compassion, mindfulness, and well-being. Mindful parenting was indirectly associated with adolescents’ self-compassion and mindfulness through a more secure perception of the relationship with the parents, and was indirectly associated with adolescents’ well-being through perceived attachment security, self-compassion and mindfulness. The path model was invariant across stages of adolescence but some relations in the model varied across gender. Self-compassion and mindfulness seem to develop within a parent-child relationship characterized by affection, self-regulation, and mindful awareness. These two resources, along with mindful parenting and positive representations of the parent-child relationship, are associated with adolescents’ well-being.     

Youth as Actors of Change? The Cases of Morocco and Tunisia

In the last decades, ‘youth’ has increasingly become a fashionable category in academic and development literature and a key development (or security) priority. However, beyond its biological attributes, youth is a socially constructed category and also one that tends to be featured in times of drastic social change. As the history of the category shows in both Morocco and Tunisia, youth can represent the wished-for model of future citizenry and a symbol of renovation, or its ‘not-yet-adult’ status which still requires guidance and protection can be used as a justification for increased social control and repression of broader social mobilisation. Furthermore, when used as a homogeneous and undifferentiated category, the reference to youth can divert attention away from other social divides such as class in highly unequal societies.     

Andalusia at the crossroads of Europeanness: immigration as a performance of coloniality

ABSTRACT

The semantics of cultural diversity, based on the political discourses of immigration as they appear in integration and anti-racist policies in Andalusia, underline the sense of Otherness of immigrant groups. In this article, Castaño, Martínez and Periáñez focus on the most relevant texts in the Planes Integrales para la Inmigración en Andalucía (Comprehensive Plans for Immigration in Andalusia). To date, these texts have formed the most significant discursive framework for representations of the third sector, trade unions and public agencies involved in the management of diversity. The key ideas in the plans revolve around transnational political references in the context of the European Union (EU). They impose a sense of Europeanness on Andalusia that is in opposition to its historical heritage, endogenous diversity and cultural specificity, and thus steer the imaginary of Andalusia's identity towards a Eurocentric idea that enhances the region's peripheral position. Immigration is regarded in the hegemonic media discourse and the social imaginary as a risk and a social problem. Integration policies, despite being couched in anti-racist rhetoric, are specifically targeted at immigrants, further enhancing the idea of Otherness. The notion of interculturality is the leitmotiv of these policies. In practical terms, however, action is limited to empty measures in the field of education. These policies, in sum, neutralize, rather than reinforce, the sense of equality on which interculturality is based. The examination of the intertextuality of Andalusian, Spanish and European discourses reveals the conformity of the discourse of Andalusia's coloniality within the framework of the EU.     

Mindful Parenting is Associated with Adolescents’ Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Through Adolescents’ Psychological Inflexibility and Self-Compassion

Journal of Youth and Adolescence - The acquisition and mastery of emotion regulation is one of the most important developmental tasks of adolescence. Difficulties in regulating emotions are one of...     

Different worlds of contention? Protest in Northwestern,Southern and Eastern Europe

Despite the voluminous literature on the ‘normalisation of protest’, the protest arena is seen as a bastion of left-wing mobilisation. While citizens on the left readily turn to the streets, citizens on the right only settle for it as a ‘second best option’. However, most studies are based on aggregated cross-national comparisons or only include Northwestern Europe. We contend the aggregate-level perspective hides different dynamics of protest across Europe. Based on individual-level data from the European Social Survey (2002–2016), we investigate the relationship between ideology and protest as a key component of the normalisation of protest. Using hierarchical logistic regression models, we show that while protest is becoming more common, citizens with different ideological views are not equal in their protest participation across the three European regions. Instead of a general left predominance, we find that in Eastern European countries, right-wing citizens are more likely to protest than those on the left. In Northwestern and Southern European countries, we find the reverse relationship, left-wing citizens are more likely to protest than their right-wing counterparts. Lessons drawn from the protest experience in Northwestern Europe characterised by historical mobilisation by the New Left are of limited use for explaining the ideological composition of protest in the Southern and Eastern European countries. We identify historical and contemporary regime access as the mechanism underlying regional patterns: citizens with ideological views that were historically in opposition are more likely to protest. In terms of contemporary regime access, we find that partisanship enhances the effect of ideology, while ideological distance from the government has a different effect in the three regions. As protest gains in importance as a form of participation, the paper contributes to our understanding of regional divergence in the extent to which citizens with varying ideological views use this tool.     

Quantitative Analysis of the Morphological Changes of the Pubic Symphyseal Face and the Auricular Surface and Implications for Age at Death Estimation

Age estimation methods are often based on the age‐related morphological changes of the auricular surface and the pubic bone. In this study, a mathematical approach to quantify these changes has been tested analyzing the curvature variation on 3D models from CT and laser scans. The sample consisted of the 24 Suchey–Brooks (SB) pubic bone casts, 19 auricular surfaces from the Buckberry and Chamberlain (BC) “recording kit” and 98 pelvic bones from the Terry Collection (Smithsonian Institution). Strong and moderate correlations between phases and curvature were found in SB casts (ρ 0.60–0.93) and BC “recording kit” (ρ 0.47–0.75), moderate and weak correlations in the Terry Collection bones (pubic bones: ρ 0.29–0.51, auricular surfaces: ρ 0.33–0.50) but associated with large individual variability and overlap of curvature values between adjacent decades. The new procedure, requiring no expert judgment from the operator, achieved similar correlations that can be found in the classic methods.