Name-calling is a pervasive practice, particularly in middle schools. According to students, parents, teachers, counselors, and other school staff who see its effects, it doesn't just go away. Instead, rampant name-calling can create a climate where children become disheartened, lose self-confidence, and dread coming to school. Efforts to…

The goal of this study was to examine the relations among various meteorological conditions, affective states and behavior in young children. Results from past research have revealed many weather effects on behavior and emotions with adult samples. However, there is a paucity of empirical evidence to support this link with children. Thirty-three…

Bullies like an audience, and bullying is often a public interaction in which there are perceived winners and losers. While some victims are targeted because of a perceived vulnerability or difference, it is also the case that anyone can become a victim of bullying. As such, students intuitively weigh their own chances of becoming victims and…

Sportsmanship is a component that is increasingly missing in youth sports. Negative experiences resulting from poor sportsmanship may lead children to limit their participation in sports or drop out all together. Parks, recreation, and tourism professionals may look to systems modeling to help develop programs and policies in the hope of…

Understanding why traditional cultures weaken matters because they embody humanity's heritage. Schooling has been singled out as an abrader of traditional culture. We assess whether schooling erodes one aspect of traditional culture: social capital as shown by generosity to people outside the household. In industrial nations researchers find…

In this article I provide a meso-level account of the interactional-institutional link by revisiting Goffman's analysis of deference and demeanor in light of Bourdieu's discussion of institutional fields, cultural capital, and symbolic power. To acquire deference, one must exhibit the appropriate demeanor towards others, and one must be equipped…

While deficits in social interaction are central to autism, the sibling relationship has been found to provide a key medium for the development of such skills. Naturalistic observations of sibling pairs including children with autism and controls with Down syndrome were made across two time periods, twelve months apart. Consistent with the…

This article reports an action research project in which children, their teacher and the author, and an advisory teacher from a Local Authority collaborated as co-researchers in a project to improve working relationships in the classroom. Both appreciative enquiry and emancipatory research informed the project. This article focuses on one aspect…

Initiatives to stop school bullying often prescribe counseling for the bullies. However, specific strategies for the counseling of bullies are not well defined. To succeed in stopping the aggressive behavior of bullies, school counselors must first understand the needs and motivations behind the behavior. This article distinguishes the…

This article presents an overview of a strengths-based school discipline initiative that was developed in response to the high suspension and expulsion rates of African American and Latino male students at a racially diverse, urban high school in California. A school task force made up of adult and youth stakeholders devised a series of…

Adolescence is a developmental period during which youth are at increased risk for using substances. An empirical focus on core competencies illustrates that youth are less likely to use substances when they have a positive future orientation, a belief in the ability to resist substances, emotional and behavioral control, sound decision-making…

The authors investigated the contemporaneous and longitudinal relations of children's (M age = 6.4 years) prosocial behavior to sympathy and moral motivation. Mothers and kindergarten teachers rated children's prosocial behavior. The authors measured sympathy via self- and adult reports. Moral motivation was assessed by children's attribution of…

The present study was designed to investigate stability and changes in prosocial behavior and the parent and peer correlates of prosocial behavior in rural adolescents. Participants were from a rural, low SES community in the Eastern United States. The participants were in 7th, 8th, and 9th grades at Time 1 and 10th, 11th, and 12th grades at Time…

The purpose of this study was to examine the impact of a buddy skills package on the social interactions between a preschooler with autism and her peers. Following baseline, the children participated in 8 sessions of training that focused on the strategies of Play, Stay, and Talk. An intervention consisting of teacher feedback, praise, and picture…

The school shootings of October 2006 arrested the world's attention. The contrast of innocence and violence, the mystery of the shooters' motivations, the fact that there were five school shooting in six weeks--all of these were factors, but none can compare to the strength of the families who chose to forgive and their witness under fire. Through…