Collaborative decision making in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) involves negotiation among the parents and medical professionals involved with a premature baby. The authors introduce economist Herbert Simon's concept of "satisficing" as a model for collaborative decision making in the NICU. Satisficing (a hybrid of "satisfy" and…

A two-year (1998-2000) School-Family Partnership for Coexistence (SFPC) programme was implemented in Acre, a mixed Jewish-Arab city in Israel, to promote parents' role as facilitators of their children literacy development and to empower parents to advance coexistence and inter-group relations. The SFPC program was part of a five-year (1995-2000)…

The purpose of this article is to synthesize recent work on aggression and victimization in educational settings from an ecological perspective. Four questions directed towards school psychologists and bullying researchers guide this review: (a) How do bullies fit into their peer ecologies? (b) How do victims fit into their peer ecologies? (c) How…

Improving parental involvement with public schools can improve schools. Parental involvement is highly important for pushing the public school systems to higher standards. Also, research reports that engaging parents in an active role in the school curriculum can open alternative opportunities for children to succeed in academics. This report will…

Dr. Deanna Pledge is a licensed psychologist and professional counselor. She has worked in public and private settings for over a decade. She has been working with teens, children, and adults around abuse issues for the past ten years, and has written "When Something Feels Wrong: A Survival Guide About Abuse." In this interview she answers a…

The urge to surpass their current skills is not unusual for healthy young children. In fact, without it, they wouldn't have bothered to crawl, then stand, then walk, and later "climb many Mt. Everests." In this article, the author assesses the case of a child who carries it a bit further than most children, which frequently put this child's safety…

Twenty women who are mothers and primary school headteachers were interviewed regarding their understanding of the self and how this interacts with the role of parent and professional. The data are read as an illustration of dialogic identities where the self is in constant negotiation regarding how to position as mother and as headteacher, and…

This article presents an up-to-date synthesis and review of recent research in the field of school absenteeism and truancy. Topics covered include: definitional issues; the Ofsted position; the LEA perspective; the causes of non-attendance and truancy; the role of parents; the link between truancy and crime; out-of-school provision; current…

Due to conceptualizations of autonomy as detachment and independence, research on the parenting-autonomy relationship in adolescence has yielded inconsistent results. In the present study, self-determination is proposed as an alternative way of tapping into the construct of autonomy. An integrated model of the relationships between perceived…

Parents are their child's first and most important teacher. This booklet introduces parents to techniques for helping their toddlers learn to read. Included is a story about how one mother encourages her son to read, a sample reading activity, and a checklist for parents of toddlers. This brochure is based on "A Child Becomes a Reader--Birth to…

A latent variable structural model was constructed to test the relations among mothers' and fathers' parenting self-efficacy (PSE), their loneliness, and their child's peer-evaluated social competence, self-evaluated loneliness, teacher-evaluated motivational orientation, and academic skills. In order to do this, first the Self-Efficacy for…

Family and community interactions provide important opportunities for facilitating the integration of children and youth with hearing loss, yet these environments have received little research attention. In this study, facilitators and barriers to integration associated with the social milieus of young people with hearing loss were identified.…

In this article, the author suggests that a Foucaultian analytics of power may be used to explain not only how white, middle-class parents make school choices, but also the effects such choices have on these parents. This essay looks at an empirical moment in which a group of white, middle-class parents responded to a change that occurred in their…

In this paper, we examine the influences of two settings--home and child care--on the development of children's speaking and listening skills before they begin formal schooling. We propose that a developmental assets approach, one that focuses on strengths of these settings, can help our understanding of the development of young children's…

Homeschooling has developed from a small, isolated, parent-led effort to a vibrant national movement to lobby for and legalize K-12 education at home in all 50 states. Although a majority of homeschool families are Evangelical Christians, the others come from a variety of religious and nonreligious backgrounds, giving homeschooling a broad…