Chapter 13: Policy Flashcards
What does government policy seek to improve?
the lives of families
What is social policy?
A set of planned actions to solve a social problem or attain a social goal
What is public policy?
Government-based social policy is often referred to as public policy
What are the purposes of social policies?
- Provide information
- Provide funding to achieve goals (i.e., child protection services)
- Provide services to prevent or reduce problems
What historical changes have taken place in child policy priorities?
- Late 1800s - Working conditions for children
- Current concerns: Poverty, health, education, child care, teenage parenthood, and child abuse, among others
to what extent are social policies effective?
Social policies are effective only to the extent funds are available to support them
What are primary prevention policies?
A set of planned actions designed to alter environmental conditions and prevent problems before they develop
What are secondary prevention policies?
A set of planned actions targeted at children who are already at risk of developing serious problems
Types of public policy: What is parent directed intervention?
Supports parents psychologically and improves their child-rearing skills
Types of public policy: What is intervention with parents and children?
- Children are helped through preschool education, child care, and healthcare
- Parents are assisted through education, job training, and parenting-skills training
Types of public policy: How can programs target children directly
Improve the quality of schools in impoverished areas or funding after-school programs
Types of public policy: What do Policies that focus on ameliorating or “fixing” problems after they have developed focus on
- Programs to reduce gang violence
- programs to encourage pregnant teens to stay in school
What are the disadvantages and consequences of poverty? (A social policy challenge)
Disadvantages:
-Powerlessnes
-Lack of information and education
-Lack of resources and restricted options
-Cycle of disadvantage
Consequences:
-Psychological distress, feel helpless, insecure, and controlled by external forces; inability to support and nurture their children
What are poor children more likely to experience compared to affluent children?
(especially when poverty is experienced in early childhood)
- Have low birth weight
- Spend time in the hospital
- Die during childhood
- Suffer from emotional or behavioral problems
- Suffer from child abuse or neglect
- Encounter violent crime
- Drop out of school
Through which routes does poverty affect children?
- Quality of the home environment
- Parents’ physical and emotional problems
- Neighborhoods with high crime and unemployment, little supervision of children, and limited resources
- Family disruptions
What are the qualities that characterize effective programs for poor families?
- Begin early in life and continued over a long period of time
- Involve parents as well as children
- Focus on improving both parent-child relationships and families’ natural support systems
- Involve community resources
What are the reasons we need childcare?
- Rise of maternal employment (maternal employment is often a necessity due to single parenthood, divorce, or difficult economic times)
- Geographic mobility: Families live farther from extended family who might have cared for children
- Changing views about what children need for social and cognitive development
Childcare is a program that lacks a unified policy
In choosing child care, what 3 things do parents balance?
Cost, convenience and quality
What determines childcare quality?
- Expert opinion: Small size group of children, a low child-adult ratio, and a high level of caregiver training
- Parent priorities: Safe and secure with a warm caregiver and opportunities for the child to learn
What are the 3 types of child care?
- Nanny
- Family child care home
- center care
Describe Nanny child care
comes to the family’s home offers personalized care. expensive; no licensing requirements
Describe family child care home
A child care arrangement in which an individual cares for three or four children in his or her home. It is convenient and relatively inexpensive; licensed by the state; typically do not offer organized educational activities
Describe Center care
A licensed and regulated type of child care facility operated by trained professional caregivers and providing educational opportunities, peer contacts, and a variety of materials and equipment but relatively expensive
In comparison with children in poorer quality care, children in higher quality care are:
- more sociable,
- considerate, compliant, controlled, and prosocial
- better adjusted, less angry and defiant
- have higher self-esteem
- have more positive relationships with the caregivers in their child care arrangement
What are the components of good child care that a parent should look for?
Plenty of materials: A center with only a few exciting toys that every child wants to play with has more fighting.
Ample staff: There should be at one caregiver for every three or four infants. Some programs claim to have that ratio, but it turns out that the afternoon groups are combined and there are more children per adult.
Balance between structure and free time: Preschoolers in highly structured programs experience higher stress levels.
Great caregivers: Having a degree in child development or early childhood education is associated with better care but equally important is whether the caregivers are caring and responsive.
Low staff turnover: Replacing a third of the staff every year causes the atmosphere to be more chaotic and children to feel less secure and connected. High turnover may also be symptomatic of other poor conditions such as low staff salaries.
how could child care policy be modified to be more helpful?
- By increasing the availability of care
- By increasing parents’ knowledge about care
- By providing more money to pay for care
- By supplementing caregivers’ wages
- By regulating quality
- By limiting the number of hours children spend in care
Teens who become pregnant are/have…
- Are more likely to live with a single parent
- Have problem behaviors and low confidence in themselves and their educational futures
- Intend to have children early
- Have mothers that are more likely to have dropped out of school and been teen mothers themselves
What are the disadvantages of being a teenage mother?
- They are less likely to return to school, stay in school, or catch up educationally once the baby is born
- They are limited in the types of jobs they can secure, and their earning power is low
- They may have difficulty affording child care
What are the disadvantages of children of teenage mothers?
- They are less likely to survive their first year
- They receive less positive and stimulating care from their parents, and are more likely to be abused
- They are more likely to develop behavior problems and do poorly in school
- They display higher levels of aggression and have less ability to control impulsive behavior
- By adolescence, they have higher rates of school failure and delinquency
- They also become sexually active at younger ages and are more likely to become pregnant before age 20
Teenage fathers…
- Adolescent boys are more likely to become teenage fathers if they are poor and prone to behavioural problems
- Poor earning power, and interference from teen mother’s family all contribute to a decline in father-child contact over time
How can support from the media reduce teen pregnancy?
- Need to increase public service announcements regarding safe sex
- Could include more realistic depictions of sex as well as negative consequences
- It is not clear whether these measures would help to reduce teen pregnancy
How effective is abstinence education for reducing teen pregnancy?
Research largely suggests that such programs are ineffective in reducing sexual activity or preventing pregnancy
What types of sex education programs in schools are effective?
- Programs that give teens accurate and complete information about safe sex and the use of contraception
- Many of these programs affected young people’s sexual behavior in a positive way, both delaying initiation of sex and increasing the use of condoms and other contraceptives
What are the results from research about child abuse within the family?
Death as a result of maltreatment at different ages. Children are far more likely to die as the result of abuse or neglect when they are very young
What is physical abuse?
Physical injury or maltreatment by a responsible person that harms or threatens a child’s health or welfare
What is sexual abuse?
Inappropriate sexual activity between an adult and a child for the adult’s pleasure or benefit
What is child neglect?
Failure of a responsible adult to provide for a child’s physical, medical, educational, or emotional needs
What factors are most commonly associated with abusive behaviour by parents?
- Distressed, often sexually unsatisfying couple relationship
- History of abuse in the family
- However, only about 1/3 of parents who were abused when they were young abuse their own children
Describe abusive mothers
- Give threatening commands, strong criticism, and physical punishment
- Their behavior is often unpredictable
- Have a distorted reaction to the child’s behavior
What are the emotional risk factors of child abuse?
-Poverty
-Parental unemployment
-Neighborhoods lacking in resources and safety (even after controlling for poverty)
-Cultural and historical factors: Media acceptance of violence,
Cultural tolerance of physical punishment
-Not caused by a single factor and more likely as factors pile up
What are the consequences of child abuse?
- Insecure attachment in infants
- Problems with emotional regulation and aggressive behavior in toddlers
- Poor relations with peers and adults and low self-esteem as children get older
- Delinquency in adolescence
- Mental and physical health impacts
What are the physical health impacts of abuse/violence?
-Increased risk for adverse physical health
-Chronic pain
-Obesity
-Inflammatory bowel disease
-Fibromyalgia
etc.
What did One physical abuse impact study find? (Springer et al, 2007)
found 34-167% higher rates of:
- allergies
- arthritis/rheumatism
- asthma
- bronchitis/emphysema
- circulation problems,
- high blood pressure
- heart troubles
- liver troubles
- ulcers
what are the programs to prevent abuse?
- Educate parents and increase their understanding of children’s behavior and development
- Increase parents’ child-rearing skills
- Send messages encouraging positive parenting and connect families with a support network during known times of conflict (e.g., periods during which report cards sent home)
- Communicate with the public at large via public service announcements
- Intervene directly with children (e.g., teach self-protection skills)
What features are most effective for programs that prevent abuse?
- Begin when a child is born and last several years
- Target multiple risk factors in the family
- Provide services that are responsive to individual family needs and sensitive to the family’s culture
- Give control to the local community
- Employ staff who are well trained and competent
What do public policies that prevent abuse focus on?
Focus on protecting children from abusive parents by:
- Requiring that people report suspected child abuse
- Removing children from abusive situation
What policy action is taken when children are abused?
-Place children in foster care. The state has the power and authority to take action to protect children from significant harm.
What does research suggest about foster care?
Research suggests that foster care placement leads to benefits for abused children compared with children who remain at home or are reunified with their parents
What are the main policy issues?
poverty, child care, education, health, juvenile justice, adoption or custody teen pregnancy, and child abuse
What are social policies designed for?
Social policies are designed to provide information, funding for programs and services to improve children’s lives through prevention or intervention
What is emotional abuse?
Manipulating someone’s emotions in a negative or harmful way, such that it causes emotional distress on teh child.
