SEARCH · PubMed Health
Explore indexed PubMed citations for clinical trials, systematic reviews and public health research. Read source abstracts and follow each citation to its original PubMed record.
Quote a phrase for an exact phrase match. Source license links do not imply unrestricted reuse.
Explore the source record for details and available documents.
Mother-child hospitalization is still rarely practiced in child psychiatric services. The experience of this kind of care in the child and adolescent psychopathology service in the Herold Hospital (Paris), however, demonstrates its interest. It permits one to respect the bond of attachment and proves to be a useful instrument of psychiatric evaluation of children, particularly in greater diagnostic precision to which the observation of the mother-child unit also contributes. The conjoint hospitalization, however, involves some risks, which can be anticipated in pre-hospitalization work up: repercussion on the family, difficulties in the functioning of the care taking team, and especially the impact on the mother of the hospitalization which creates a real crisis situation which must be handled in order to be able to use the maturative possibilities.
Explore the source record for details and available documents.
Explore the source record for details and available documents.
Explore the source record for details and available documents.
Explore the source record for details and available documents.
Explore the source record for details and available documents.
Explore the source record for details and available documents.
Decisions about the occurrence of child abuse are increasingly difficult to make because concepts of what qualifies as reportable child abuse may be broadening. We examined this question by comparing 51 fatal child abuse cases occurring in Georgia between July 1975 and December 1979 to non-fatal cases and to the Georgia population. Overall rates of fatal child abuse were higher for male perpetrators compared with female and black perpetrators compared with white. However, the latter finding varied with economic and geographic status. The highest child abuse fatality rates were found in poor, rural, white families (3.3/100,000 children) and in poor, urban, black families (2.4/100,000 children). Risk factors for fatal abuse included early childhood (RR 6:1), parental teenage childbearing (RR 4:1), and low socioeconomic status. These characteristics were similar to those of the severe child abuse cases noted in the early child abuse literature. Non-fatal cases did not clearly share these risk factors. Severe abuse, here represented by fatal cases, is a distinct subset of reported child abuse, but characteristics associated with it are frequently attributed to all reportable child abuse. Medical personnel should be aware that they cannot rely on the presence or absence of these characteristics in screening for risk of reportable child abuse. Child abuse research should use restricted, stated case definitions. When intervention and prevention programs are being organized, they should not generalize research findings to all forms of child abuse.
Explore the source record for details and available documents.
Explore the source record for details and available documents.
Explore the source record for details and available documents.
Explore the source record for details and available documents.
In a state with minimal child care standards, we found pervasive differences in third graders associated with earlier child care histories. More extensive child are predicted children receiving more negative ratings from parents and teachers, poorer academic and conduct grades, lower standardized test scores, and more negative sociometric nominations. In addition, for some variables (IQ, work habits negative peer nominations, and compliance ratings) there was evidence of interactive effects in which both extensive infant care and exclusive maternal care were associated with more problematical functioning, depending on parental marital status, social class, and child gender. We found no evidence of negative effects associated with part-time care. This study has several important limitations that should be acknowledged. The first is the danger of generalizing these results to states and communities with higher-quality child care standards than those imposed in Texas. They may, unfortunately, be generalizable to the twenty states with child care regulations similar to those in Texas. This study has another important limitation. It did not examine the underlying processes that might contribute to the effects of child care history. For example, we do not know if the differences in children who were in part-time versus extensive child care are owing to (1) differences in the children's experiences while they are in the child care settings, or (2) differences in the quality of interactions that occur when the two groups of children are at home, or (3) some combination of children's experiences in child care and the family.
Child to Child is an approach to health education of the primary school-age child. In developing countries, infants and young children spend much of their lives in the care of an older brother or sister. Morley, a paediatrician, saw the potential of teaching these older children to provide better care for their siblings. Working with colleagues in education, Child to Child was launched in 1978, the International Year of the Child. Teaching material was prepared covering developmental needs, nutrition, common illnesses and aspects of the environment; a book was published describing an activity-oriented teaching method. This material was distributed to developing countries world-wide, with encouragement to use the material and ideas freely, adapting, translating, or innovating as found useful. Child to Child is now in use in 60 or more countries, and in at least 15 languages. It is being used by agencies like the World Bank, UNICEF, UNESCO, and OXFAM as a way of reinforcing community education in the search for 'Health for All by 2000'. A world-wide review of Child to Child is in hand. Information from this will help to provide firm guidelines on implementation in the different contexts where its value has already been established.
Relationships among maternal characteristics, ratings of child behavior, and observed mother-child interactions were examined in a sample of 40 4- to 12-year-old children with externalizing disorders. Mothers and children were observed in a task interaction and mothers provided self-reports of depressed mood, parenting self-esteem, marital satisfaction, social support, and life stress. Child behavior was rated by both mothers and teachers. Several significant correlations were found among observed mother and child behaviors and among maternal self-report measures. However, few significant relationships were found between maternal characteristics and observed mother or child behavior. Although life stress predicted increased child negativity, maternal depressed mood was related to more appropriate child behavior. Mother and teacher ratings of child behavior demonstrated few significant relationships with other measures. These results suggest that, in samples comprised primarily of children with attention deficit disorder from socially advantaged families, few relationships exist between maternal characteristics, parenting behavior, and child behavior.
In an investigation of child-rearing styles maternal use of "positive contact" was measured by asking the mother how often she played with the child, praised the child, and the like, and combining the responses into a score. Home observations on a sample of families revealed that mothers scoring above the mean used fewer communications in the form of directives and "unmodified power" and more communication in the form of praise and social conversation than mothers scoring below the mean. The mother's use of positive contact was related to her educational level, the birth order of the child and number of children in the family, the father's use of positive contact, and to a friendly outgoing pattern of child behavior. There was no relation to the mother's use of physical punishment, her protectiveness, her tendency to comply with the child's demands, or her child-rearing ideology and other attitudes. Child care workers are in a strategic position to educate parents about the importance of this kind of contact, especially with later-born children in large families.
Physical child abusers and adults at risk for child abuse, relative to comparison subjects, are reported to be more physiologically reactive to child-related stressors. It is not known if the reported physiological reactivity is child specific or if physical child abusers and at-risk parents are also more reactive to other types of stressful stimuli. The present study investigated changes in heart rate and skin conductance in response to four types of non-child-related stressors in at-risk and matched low-risk mothers. The four types of stressful stimuli were: a cold pressor; a stressful film depicting industrial accidents; unsolvable anagrams; and an aversive car horn. At-risk mothers, relative to low-risk mothers, had greater and more prolonged sympathetic activation during presentations of the cold pressor and the stressful film, the stimuli rated as the most stressful. The present data, combined with previous findings, support the view that generalized sympathetic activation to both child and non-child-related stressors may serve as a mediator of physical child abuse.