Gerry Redmond

Children as Actors: How Does the Child Perspectives Literature Treat Agency in the Context of Poverty?

The purpose of this review is to examine agency in the worldwide literature on childrens perspectives on poverty. By definition, asking children about their lives and responses to living in poverty assumes that they are competent actors – this is one of the positive features of the new and burgeoning literature on childrens perspectives. Findings from research in poorer and richer countries are summarised and compared, and childrens agency is categorised using frameworks proposed by Ruth Lister and John Micklewright into a number of different types, including self-exclusion, exclusion of children by other children, ‘getting by’, ‘getting (back) at’, ‘getting out’, and ‘getting organised’. The review concludes with suggestions on where more research is needed on childrens agency in the context of poverty.

How high is infant mortality in central and eastern Europe and the commonwealth of independent states

This paper examines the measurement of infant mortality in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). There are worrying indications that official infant mortality counts, based on administrative data, may understate the true gravity of the problem in 15 countries in the region, including 11 out of 12 CIS countries, and 4 countries in South Eastern Europe. In the case of eight CIS countries in the Caucasus and Central Asia plus Romania, the evidence is strongest, not least because surveys that allow independent estimation of infant mortality have been carried out there. In the case of the remaining six countries, the evidence is more circumstantial, and based on inconsistencies within the official data themselves, combined with information on how live births are defined. However, we find also that surveys are rather blunt instruments, and that the confidence intervals that surround estimates from these surveys are often large.

Child poverty and child rights: Edging towards a definition

The purpose of this paper is to consider how one might develop a definition of child poverty that is based on the Convention on the Rights of the Child (and the human rights treaties with which it is associated), but also draws on the development of poverty research in the social sciences. It focuses in particular on Article 27(1) of the Convention because of the Articles dual emphasis on an adequate standard of living as an input and a childs development as an outcome. Three perspectives in the social sciences – economic welfare, capabilities, and social exclusion – are compared in order to determine what they can contribute to this input- and outcome-based definition of child poverty. All are found to have advantages and disadvantages. The paper concludes that there are two challenges faced by researchers and policymakers: first, the construction of conversion factors used in the capability approach to link inputs to outcomes; and second, the adoption of national inequality-based standards for assessing indicators of child poverty, thus placing the onus on states to reduce child poverty through redistribution.

Income Inequality in Hungary, 1987-1993

The authors examine the growth of income inequality in Hungary in the early transition period. They use household budget survey data from four years between 1987 and 1993 to examine the factors associated with the levels and changes in inequality. They find that public policy inhibited the increase in household income inequality initially. Tax and benefit policies, and the increasing diversity among sources of household incomes, interacted to cause a roller-coaster pattern in which the first spurt in inequality was reversed, but then followed by a further sharp increase.

Children’s agency and the welfare state: Policy priorities and contradictions in Australia and the UK

Since the early 1990s, liberal welfare regimes have begun to treat lone parents as workers rather than as carers. This has happened in conjunction with an ongoing ‘moral panic’ about the need to develop policies to invest in children, and to protect them from adult worlds. The purpose of this article is to analyse contradictions within and between these strands of policy in two liberal welfare states — Australia and the UK. The article argues that recent welfare-to-work policies in both countries bring into sharp relief the contradictions inherent in assumptions that welfare states make about the agency of lone parents as workers and carers, and of children as incompetent.

Conceptualisation of social and emotional wellbeing for children and young people, and policy implications

This report asks what is meant by social and emotional wellbeing for children and young people and identifies possible national indicators based on these constructs. Why is there so little nationally and internationally comparable data on the social and emotional wellbeing of children and young people? How can Australia begin to benchmark the wellbeing of its own children and young people without such basic information? With the support of the Fred P. Archer Trust, which is managed by the Trust Company, and in partnership with the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW) and UNICEF Australia, ARACY commissioned two research papers to address what is meant by social and emotional wellbeing for children (those aged 0–12 years) and young people (those aged 13-25 years) and to identify possible key national measures / indicators based on these constructs. This work also considers the policy and practice implications of analysing and reporting on such data. The Social Policy Research Centre (UNSW) was selected to undertake this research and chose to combine the two parts of this project into this extensive research report. In mid-June AIHW and ARACY jointly hosted a workshop in Canberra. This workshop was one of a series of data development forums that AIHW has been conducting as part of its Headline Indicators for children’s health, development and wellbeing project. As a follow-up to the June workshop, ARACY hosted a 90 minute roundtable discussion on the issues concerning social and emotional wellbeing indicators for children and young people at the Australian Institute of Family Studies (AIFS) Conference in Melbourne, on 9th July. The workshop also provided an opportunity to reflect on progress made on developing our understanding of this complex topic since a roundtable held at the International Society for Child Indicators (ISCI) Conference in November 2009.

What Can Data on Educational Outcomes Reveal Regarding Australian Children's Right to Develop 'To Their Fullest Potential'?

Is Australia fulfilling its obligations towards its children, in particular fostering their development to their fullest potential, in accordance with its obligations under the Convention on the Rights of the Child? This article addresses this complex question by elaborating three alternative conceptualisations of the right to development to ones fullest potential, based on the literature on human rights principles, and on the writings of the philosophers John Rawls, Michael Walzer, and Amartya Sen. The analysis suggests that while Australia performs well in comparison with other rich countries according to indicators of educational achievement, disparities in educational outcomes are large, implying that many children fail to realise their right to education to their fullest potential. This is not surprising. More surprising is the contrast between the diligence with which educational outcomes in Australia are measured, and the lack of accurate information on public resource inputs (except at the most highly aggregated levels) to achieve those outcomes. The paper concludes that while the measurement of student outcomes is an important step in the realisation of all Australian childrens right to education to their fullest potential, the failure to accurately monitor resource inputs represents an equal failure by Australian governments to protect and promote childrens rights.

The unknown citizen: epidemiological challenges in child mental health

Growing concern about the global burden of child mental health disorders has generated an increased interest in population-level efforts to improve child mental health. This in turn has led to a shift in emphasis away from treatment of established disorders and towards prevention and promotion. Prevention efforts are able to draw on a substantial epidemiological literature describing the prevalence and determinants of child mental health disorders. However, there is a striking lack of clearly conceptualised and measurable positive outcomes for child mental health, which may result in missed opportunities to identify optimal policy and intervention strategies. In this paper, we propose an epidemiological approach to child mental health which is in keeping with public health principles and with the WHO definition of health, and which is grounded in current thinking about child development. Constructs such as competence offer the opportunity to develop rigorous outcome measures for epidemiological research, while broader ideas about ‘the good life’ and ‘the good society’ derived from philosophical thinking can enable us to shape policy initiatives based on normative ideas of optimal child mental health that extend beyond individuals and undoubtedly beyond the traditional boundaries of the health sector.

A Socio‐Economic Profile of Families in the First Wave of the Longitudinal Study of Indigenous Children

Abstract ‘Footprints in time’, the Longitudinal Study ofIndigenous Children (LSIC), has been devel-oped to provide insights into how Indigenouschildren’searlyyearsaffecttheirdevelopment.Socio-economicfactorsareatthecoreofmanyanalyses of child development and well-beingandthisarticleprovidesasocio-economicpro-file of Indigenous families in the first wave ofthe LSIC. Utilising 12 indicators that are or-ganisedintothreegroups—primarycarer,fam-ilyincomeandfinancialstress—thearticlepro-vides an extensive overview of the full rangeof socio-economic data available in the LSIC.The article examines whether, when taken to-gether, the different indicators tell a consistentstory. It finds that, broadly, they do. The articleraises some issues about the reporting of cer-tain government payments and highlights theimportanceoffamilysizewhenlookingatfam-ily income. The article concludes by pointingto the potential for future research that thesedata present. ∗ Mullan: Australian Institute of Family Studies, Victoria3000 Australia; Redmond: School of Social andPolicy Studies, Flinders University, South Australia5001 Australia. Corresponding author: Mullan, email

Investment in early childhood in Australia: international comparisons and recent trends

Abstract There is growing recognition that investment by governments on children in their early years is an important part of social policy. However there is currently little information either about how much governments invest on children of different ages, or about what the optimum investment in the early years would look like. Using currently available Australian datasets, this article explores two approaches to estimate the adequacy of investment in early childhood; comparing government expenditure between countries, and analysing one country (in this case Australia) in terms of expenditure over time on children of different ages. We find that, overall, Australia spends more than the average of OECD countries on the early years, but that a much higher proportion of this expenditure is spent on cash transfers to parents rather than on early care and education. Furthermore, spending on the early years has grown proportionately to spending on older children over the past several years. The paper ends with a number of suggestions for further research which will refine the analysis of investment in the early years.