Browsing by Subject "childhood"

Now showing 1 - 7 of 7
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    Adoption and American Empire: Migration, Race-making, and the Child, 1845-1988
    (2017-02) Condit-Shrestha, Kelly
    In the United States, between 1854 and 1929, more than 150,000 working class youth were transported by “orphan trains” from their urban eastern city homes to live with families in the (primarily) rural American West. Since 1953, more than 150,000 adopted Korean children have migrated into U.S. families. Both during and in-between these orphan trains and Korean adoptions, Americans have also experimented with such child placement practices linked to nineteenth century black codes and boarding schools, twentieth century child welfare movements (at home and abroad), and postwar international adoptions. As patterns of mobility and migration have changed alongside technology and transportation modernization, imperial expansion, and the growth and consolidation of nation-states, child placement practices have also changed. Reflecting the specificity of each time and place, adoption and child placement discourse has historically been rife with tensions between sentiment and economics, exploitation and humanitarianism. While adoption implies the permanent transfer of a child away from the biological parent(s) to another person, the reasons, motivations, social practices, as well as the legal and cultural parameters of adoption have changed dramatically and unevenly in the modern era of nation-states. My dissertation utilizes “child placement” as its central frame of analysis to more accurately document the wide array of practices in U.S history that have historically involved the separation of children from their birth parents, to live under the authority of other adults. Adoption and American Empire examines the relationship between migration, race-making, and child placement as central and strategic components in America’s consolidation as a nation-state and expansion as a global empire, between 1845 and 1988. In three parts that transverse the historical periods of U.S. Reconstruction, the Progressive Era, interwar years, and post-World War II, I document continuity and transformation between older forms of child placement undertaken for child labor needs (such as with African American children during Reconstruction) and modern forms of adoption for humanitarian or sentimental reasons (including refugee and “orphan” children from West Germany). By linking these histories, I demonstrate that child placement is always inextricably tied to United States’ practices and discourses of empire and race. Few scholars have explored the linkages between these different forms of child placement. By employing the methods of social and cultural history, as well as multiple scales of analysis (comparative, regional, national, transnational) across an expansive archive of source material (state, immigration, and U.S. military government law, regional and national newspapers, the ethnic press, government reports, the U.S. congressional record, and archival documents), I illuminate the historic continuities and structures of power embedded in these seemingly disconnected practices. Ultimately, my dissertation contends that Americans’ practices of child placement and adoption have served as powerful tools of U.S. empire, employed widely when their implementation would assist the nation’s larger geopolitical and economic objectives. Always undergirded by nationalist racial logics, the children themselves would be increasingly valued as they came to encompass both the real and symbolic vision of how the United States imagined itself, or wished to be imagined, by its global peers.
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    Assessment of Upper Limb Proprioception in Children with Developmental Coordination Disorder
    (2017-08) Tseng, Yu-Ting
    It has long been suspected that proprioceptive abnormalities underlie the motor problems in children with developmental coordination disorder (DCD). However, current empirical evidence of proprioceptive dysfunction in children with DCD is still inconsistent. To address this issue, this study pursued the following three aims: 1) To obtain objective measures of position sense acuity to verify that children with DCD have proprioceptive deficits. 2) To examine whether the proprioceptive abnormality in children with DCD is joint-specific or a generalized somatosensory deficit that affects distal as well as proximal joints. 3) To investigate the relationship between motor function and position sense acuity in children with and without DCD. Methods: Twenty children with DCD [(Mean age: 10 years 4 months (SD: 3 months); 9 ♂, 11♀) and thirty typically developing (TD) children [M age: 10 years 5 months (SD: 3 months); 14 ♂, 16♀] were recruited and screened using Movement Assessment Battery for Children (MABC-2). The DCD group had total MABC-2 score below 5th percentile, and TD group was above 25th percentile. Using a body-scalable wrist and elbow bimanual manipulandum, proprioceptive status was assessed using 1) a wrist and elbow joint position matching task requiring active movement to reproduce a target position with either the same or the opposite hand/forearm, and 2) a psychophysical two-alternate forced choice test for the wrist that relied on passive motion. It required children to discriminate between two joint positions. We measured both aspects of position sense acuity: bias and precision. Bias indicates the proximity of a sensed limb position corresponds to the true physical position of the limb. Precision represents the random error or the agreement between independent repeated responses and is thus a measure of response consistency. Results: First, in comparison to TD controls children with DCD exhibited a significantly lower position sense precision on both elbow (p < 0.05) and wrist (p < 0.001). Position sense bias during active joint position matching at either joint was not significantly higher in children with DCD. Second, the mean wrist position sense discrimination threshold for passive displacement was highly elevated in DCD group (+171%; p < 0.001). Third, position sense discrimination threshold correlated significantly with upper limb motor (r = -0.40) and balance scores (r= -0.50). Conclusion: This study documents that DCD is associated with a dysfunction of position sense. Furthermore, the proprioceptive dysfunction affected both proximal and distal upper limb joints in children with DCD, which is consistent with a view that proprioceptive dysfunction in DCD is generalized in nature. Given the substantial evidence that proprioceptive deficits degrade motor control, these sensory deficits may partly explain fine motor control impairment in DCD.
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    Constructing and Contesting “the Girlhood of Our Empire”: Girls’ Culture, Labor, and Mobility in Britain, South Africa, and New Zealand, c. 1830-1930
    (2019-04) Dillenburg, Elizabeth
    This dissertation studies girls’ complex, often paradoxical roles in the British Empire and analyzes how discussions about the education, employment, and emigration of girls both reflected and shaped broader political, economic, and social debates. Although girls are marginalized in studies of colonialism, concerted efforts to educate and emigrate girls reveal how the project of empire building depended on the mobility and labor of girls and young women. This dissertation begins by considering the ways in which youth organizations sought to transform girls into “empire builders” and girls’ roles as migrants, settlers, laborers, and creators and transmitters of colonial knowledge. Girls supported the empire, but they also challenged systems of colonial power and resisted prescribed roles in various ways, from penning criticisms of false imperial propaganda to absconding from exploitative situations. While most histories of childhood focus on one region, “Constructing and Contesting ‘the Girlhood of Our Empire’” employs a multi-sited framework that examines girlhood in different areas of the empire—concentrating specifically on Britain, New Zealand, and South Africa—to elucidate variations within broader colonial processes. As explored in the second part of the dissertation, emigration programs for British girls to New Zealand and South Africa faced innumerable obstacles, and their limited success exposed fault lines within the colonial project. The third part of the dissertation focuses debates over the employment of African and Māori girls as domestic servants in British colonial households and how these debates reveal the ways in which ideas of girlhood and girls’ lives were intertwined with conceptualizations of the nation, empire, and race. The nature of the colonial archive means that girls’ experiences rarely appear in the traditional sources, but their voices do emerge in letters they wrote to family and friends, articles they composed for children’s periodicals, scrapbooks they crafted, and photographs and artwork they created. Utilizing these myriad sources, “Constructing and Contesting ‘the Girlhood of Our Empire’” provides new insights into girls’ roles in the empire and more nuanced understandings of how class, race, and geography mediated girls’ experiences of and engagement with colonialism.
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    Contending Purposes of Pre-Kindergarten: A Comparative Case Study of Early Childhood Education Policy in Minnesota
    (2022-05) Klapperich, Alexandra
    Policymakers predominantly represent Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) as an investment in children’s human capital development. Despite the dominance of this policy discourse, limited research explores how it operates as a policymaking strategy or compares the perspectives of policymakers, children, parents, and educators regarding ECEC. This dissertation research addresses this gap through a Comparative Case Study of ECEC in Minnesota, where investment discourse is pervasive. I apply a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) of Minnesota ECEC policy texts to explore how policy actors privilege investment discourse in legitimating ECEC reform. Through this CDA I highlight the assumptions regarding children’s subjectivity that underlie Minnesota policy actors’ use of investment discourse. I apply Critical Race Theory to explore how Minnesota ECEC policy actors’ engagement of investment discourse reinforces racist assumptions regarding inequality in education.Additionally, this dissertation examines the perspectives and priorities of key social actors in ECEC practice, including children, a pre-K educator, and parents. I draw on school-based research that I conducted in a pre-K classroom in the greater Minneapolis, Minnesota area. I describe how two parents and a pre-K educator emphasize the importance of children’s social-emotional learning in pre-K, and pre-K’s role in readying children for future schooling. I also outline how these participants negotiate investment discourse as they make choices for their children’s and students’ education. Meanwhile, the pre-K students who participated in this research valued opportunities to engage in free play and artistic endeavors, and to visit their playground and the gym. They also emphasized rules regarding safety, as well as strategies to negotiate relationships with peers and process their feelings. I contrast students’ narratives regarding pre-K with policy actors’ prioritization of ECEC as a means to ready children for academic success and eventual economic productivity. I show how students’ priorities are at risk as a result of the heightened academic expectations in ECEC. Drawing on the New Sociology of Childhood, I argue that engaging children in this dissertation research offers emancipatory possibilities for destabilizing investment discourse’s dominance and forging justice in ECEC.
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    Preventing Childhood Migraines
    (2010-07-22) Herseth, Jonathan
    Migraines in children can be a serious problem affecting both life and school. Recurrent headaches on one side of the head or both with throbbing sensation associated with an upset stomach and vomiting, changes in vision, dizziness may indicate migraines. Lifestyle changes can help to decrease these headaches. In some cases, medications may be used to prevent headache or decrease the frequency of headaches for those who do not respond to more conservative efforts to decrease. Topiramate (Topamax) is a medication that has been shown in kids to reduce the frequency and the severity of headaches. Some side effects may be nervousness, electrolyte imbalance, emotional changes and kidney stones. Other medications have also been used with good results.
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    Reading Agency: The Making of Modern German Childhoods in the Age of Revolutions
    (2015-07) Bruce, Emily
    This dissertation demonstrates how active reading and writing became a defining feature of childhood during the age of revolutions. Beginning in educated middle-class families at the end of the Enlightenment and disseminating across European society by the end of the nineteenth century, a series of radical transformations occurred in the ideologies and practices of childhood: as a life stage, it was increasingly positioned as critical to self-formation; adults began to worry about entertaining children in active ways; sentimental attitudes influenced children’s learning; and at the same time, pedagogues and parents emphasized the cultivation of self-discipline. Pedagogical innovations, the development of new book genres and markets, and an increased emphasis on bourgeois domesticity joined to make German-speaking Central Europe a vital site for reimagining childhood. The development of modern childhood has traditionally been understood as a process enacted on youth by adults, but in practice children’s socialization was mediated by young people’s own choices. To better understand the roles children played in transformations of modern life, there is now a need for studies which combine the history of changing sentiments with the history of children’s lived experience. In addition to the ideas and practices of pedagogues and family educators, we also must consider the part children played. Rather than dismissing the disciplinary aspects of pedagogy or overlooking the power of children to influence adults, my approach emphasizes the mutual constitution of agency and discipline in determining how children influenced European modernity. Reading Agency furthermore shows how children participated in inventing the modern self. I argue that the emergence of the active child reader and writer was not simply a consequence of expanding literacy, but, in fact, a key constituent of modern life. The dissertation is organized as a series of case studies in literacy practices—youth periodicals, fairy tales, geographic schoolbooks, children’s letters, and youth diaries—which each demonstrate the complex and socially embedded ways in which children form opinions, exercise power, and make history.
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    Social Stress Buffering by Friends in Childhood and Adolescence: Effects on HPA and Oxytocin Activity
    (2016-05) Doom, Jenalee
    Previous research has demonstrated that before puberty, parents are able to buffer, and often completely block, cortisol responses to social evaluative stressors (e.g., Trier Social Stress Test; TSST). However, after puberty, parents no longer provide a powerful buffer of the HPA axis from a social-evaluative stressor. The current study investigates whether friends can buffer the HPA axis in both children and adolescents compared to parents and whether similar stress-ameliorating patterns can also be observed in oxytocin activity. A total of 109 participants (54 children ages 9-10 and 55 adolescents ages 15-16; approximately half of each sex) completed the TSST and were randomly assigned to prepare for their speech with their parent or friend for 5 minutes beforehand. Salivary cortisol and urinary oxytocin were measured before and after the TSST. For children, cortisol responses were comparable regardless of who helped the child prepare the speech. For adolescents, however, friends actually amplified the cortisol response compared to parents. In addition, adolescents produced less oxytocin than children, as did males compared to females. Notably, for boys, oxytocin levels decreased across the session if participants prepared with a friend rather than their parent. The mean change was in the same direction but not significant for girls. These results indicate that friends do not take over the social buffering role by age 15-16, which may inform interventions in at-risk children and adolescents.