ADOLESCENTS' VIEWS ON THE FAIRNESS OF PARENTING AND FINANCIAL ARRANGEMENTS AFTER SEPARATION

Interviews were conducted with 60 young people aged 12–19 in Australia, concerning their views about parenting and financial arrangements after separation. Half the young people reported that they had no say at all in where they would live after separation. A quarter said they were never able to see their nonresident parent when they wanted to. There was a strong relationship between young people's perceptions of the fairness of the parenting arrangements and the extent to which they were allowed to participate in making those arrangements. Half said that they did not have enough time with their nonresident parent. Having a continuing and meaningful relationship with both parents and with siblings was very important to them. More than a third favored arrangements of spending equal time with each parent. The young people were also very concerned with issues about fairness between first and second families, both in terms of time availability and financial provisions.     

Why Deliberate? The Encounter Between Deliberation and New Public Managers

A number of organizations in Britain's National Health Service (NHS) have been experimenting with 'deliberative' techniques of citizen involvement, techniques that were designed with democratic imperatives in mind. However, political practices are moulded by their institutional settings and the goals of their proponents, so it is unlikely that they have been left 'pure' following their encounter with public management imperatives.
This paper offers an explanation for the interest in deliberative processes in the NHS by comparing deliberative and public management imperatives, as well as discussing more case-specific motivations, drawing on interviews with health policy actors between May and July 2001. I then use those insights to highlight gaps between the deliberative ideal and deliberative practice, showing what has been gained and what has been lost in the encounter between deliberative democracy and new public managers.     

The school failure as tutor: An exploratory approach

This paper describes a pilot program in the use of high school near dropouts as tutors for young children. The work is set in the context of adolescent developmental tasks and draws its rationale from the general human tendency to reach mastery by turning passivity into activity. We ask whether adolescents who have experienced a decade of school failure and misery might use the opportunity for a new form of more active contact with the schools to master old failures. We reasoned that the very area of failure, where these adolescents show apparent uninterest through truancy and minimal work, must be a highly emotionally charged one (albeit negatively) precisely because it is an area of failure. After describing the setting and the rationale, we analyze the experience for several tutors from the point of view of their relationship to (1) the tutees, (2) the tutor-supervisor, (3) the group of adolescent tutors, and (4) the social system of the elementary school.Received Ph.D. from Department of Social Relations, Harvard University, 1956. Main current research interest is in the developmental process.This work was conducted while on the staff of the Department of Psychiatry, Bronx Municipal Hospital Center. Currently Instructor, Department of Psychiatry, Montefiore Hospital, Albert Einstein College of Medicine. Received Ph.D. from School of Education, New York University, 1971. Main current interest is in early childhood development.