Where do they learn violence? The roles of three forms of violent socialization in childhood

an article by Jeongsuk Kim (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA), Bora Lee (State University of New York, USA) and Naomi B. Farber (University of South Carolina, USA) published in Children and Youth Services Review Volume 107 (December 2019)

Highlights

• Male students experienced more early violent socialisation and were more approving of interpersonal violence than female students.
• Advised violence, messages supporting fighting, was a stronger predictor of students’ acceptance of violence than other types of violent socialisation.
• Violence socialisation in a family context has a greater effect on students’ acceptance of violence than violence in a community context.
• The relationship between violent socialisation and acceptance of violence was not significantly different between male and female students.

Abstract

Early violent socialisation in family and community contexts has consistently been found to affect individuals' attitudes toward interpersonal violence in adulthood. The specific sources and processes underlying children’s acquisition of attitudes toward violence, however, are poorly specified and unelaborated.

The current study examined how three types of early violent socialisation differently influenced college students’ (N = 3841) acceptance of interpersonal violence and how these influences differed according to gender.

Findings from multiple linear regression analyses indicated that advised violence, witnessed violence, and victimised violence each contributed to college students’ acceptance of violence as a valid problem-solving strategy. However, each form of violence differently affected students’ acceptance of violence.

Receiving verbal advice to be violent from family and community members had stronger associations with students’ acceptance of interpersonal violence than did witnessing or experiencing violence during childhood. These relationships were not significantly different between male and female students. Whereas existing studies on violent socialisation have largely focused on the effects of witnessing and experiencing violence during childhood, our findings also highlight the significant impact of receiving pro-violence messages from family and community members has on young college students’ acceptance of interpersonal violence.

This connection suggests that educational programs targeting parents and community elders should focus on encouraging anti-violence attitudes and coaching children in nonviolent conflict-resolution skills. Our results might help inform college violence prevention practitioners in developing programs for college students to help change their pro-violence attitudes.

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How I Stopped Feeling So Lonely and Disconnected

a post by Charles A. Francis for the Tiny Buddha blog



If I were given the chance to relive my childhood, I wouldn’t take it. For the most part, those were times I’d rather forget. I didn’t get along well in school, and family life was less than ideal. About the only thing I liked about the seventies and eighties was the rock ‘n’ roll music.

As a kid growing up in Miami, I had an Asian look about me, even though I was of Hispanic descent. Many of the kids in school asked me if I was Chinese; some called me a stupid chink; and a few just beat me up.

Things at home weren’t much easier. My parents divorced when I was in grade school. I lived with my mom and three sisters (all older and bigger than me). There were the usual sibling rivalries. So, at school I got beat up by the boys, and at home I got beat up by the girls.

I hardly had any friends. Anybody I associated with was just as much a misfit as I was. I spent most of my free time either with my head in a book or riding my bike around the neighborhood.

High school was torture. I was shy, unattractive, and under-developed. And though I was small for my age, the hormones still surged through my body. Like any other teenage boy, I wanted to be at least noticed by the girls, but it seemed like every girl was out of my league.

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Talking heresy about ‘quality’ early childhood education and care for children in poverty

an article by Donald Simpson (Teeside University, UK), Sandra Loughran (no affiliation given), Eunice Lumsden (University of Northampton, UK), Philip Mazzocco (The Ohio University at Mansfield, USA), Rory McDowall Clarke (University of Worcester, UK) and Christian Winterbottom (University of North Florida, USA) published in Journal of Poverty and Social Justice Volume 26 Number 1 (February 2018)

Abstract

This paper considers the socially progressive function of a model of ‘quality’ early childhood education and care widely prescribed to address child poverty across England and the USA.

Ubiquitous, it is imbued with a sense of objectivity, secureness and practicality.

We question these foundations.

Then using data from practitioners in both countries, we contrast expectations about this model of ECEC as an unmitigated good building resilience to ‘break cycles of disadvantage’, with the everyday experiences and frustrations of practitioners pursuing it.

Their data suggest this model of ‘quality’ has limitations and some heresy is required about this policy orthodoxy.

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Childhood of Dreams. If You Build It…

a post by Will Meecham for the Guideposts to Happiness blog [via World of Psychology]

You grew up with the happiest childhood imaginable. You did! You really did! Or at least you might have. And you know the bumper sticker that says, “It’s never too late to have a happy childhood”? I’ve learned it speaks the truth, though not in the way I always thought.

A few months ago I devised for myself a new and helpful meditation. It probably isn’t my creation, but if I heard of it before I’m not sure where. Meditation may be too strong a word; visualization or fantasy might fit better. The basic technique involves imagining a better childhood and family life than I actually experienced.

On my older, less visited blog, I’ve written often about my dismal childhood. It’s tempting to outline it here, but in essence all unhappy childhoods are the same. The details are not important to my current topic. What’s more, in the course of my life I’ve spent far too much time reliving the tragic drama of my upbringing. As a result, my bereaved and abused childhood has become a kind of background legend to explain my life and personality. Although it is an unflattering trait, I admit to building a story of myself as a Ruined Child. My aunt tells me that at my youngest ages I was an exceedingly affectionate and happy toddler. But in my mind, at least, bad luck and cruelty crushed that innate sweetness.

So what is my visualization? I picture a completely different upbringing. The destruction of my childhood was set in motion when my father insisted on moving to Los Angeles, where he had discovered ‘swinging’ and ‘free love.’

My mother, a proper midwestern girl, hated the place and the lifestyle for which my dad yearned, and refused to go along. In real life, they divorced. In my ‘meditation’, they reached a compromise and moved to Berkeley instead.

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Some interesting thoughts there. Personally I think I would worry about living only in my imagination and not coping with the real things in life. But that’s my problem – there are no unpaid bills hiding underneath the coffee table because I have imagined them away! Try telling that to the bailiff when he comes for the money.

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Symptoms of Mental Health Problems: Children’s and Adolescents’ Understandings and Implications for Gender Differences in Help Seeking

an article by Alice MacLean, Kate Hunt and Helen Sweeting (MRC Social and Public Health Sciences Unit, University of Glasgow, UK) published in Children & Society Volume 27 Issue 3 (May 2013)

Abstract

Amidst concerns that young people’s mental health is deteriorating, it is important to explore their understandings of symptoms of mental health problems and beliefs around help seeking.

Drawing on focus group data from Scottish school pupils, we demonstrate how they understood symptoms of mental health problems and how their characterisations of these symptoms as ‘rare’ and ‘weird’ informed participants’ perceptions that peers, teachers and parents would respond to disclosure in stigmatising ways.

Consequently, participants suggested that they would delay or avoid disclosing symptoms of mental health problems.

We highlight subtle gender and age differences and outline implications for policy and practice.

Full text (PDF 13pp)

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Childhood Origins of Adult Resistance to Science

Resistance to certain scientific ideas derives in large part from assumptions and biases that can be demonstrated experimentally in young children and that may persist into adulthood. In particular, both adults and children resist acquiring scientific information that clashes with common-sense intuitions about the physical and psychological domains. Additionally, when learning information from other people, both adults and children are sensitive to the trustworthiness of the source of that information. Resistance to science, then, is particularly exaggerated in societies where nonscientific ideologies have the advantages of being both grounded in common sense and transmitted by trustworthy sources.

Read the Full Text of this article by Paul Bloom and Deena Skolnick Weisberg (Department of Psychology, Yale University, New Haven, CT) with grateful thanks to The Edge which is one of my favourite reads (by which I mean not necessarily having any direct relevance to work, business management, careers information or self development).