Jaerim Lee

Certified Healthy Family Specialists' Job and Working Conditions from the Insiders' Perspective

Abstract The number of Healthy Family Support Centers has dramatically increased during the past eight years since the Framework Act on Healthy Families was enacted. This phenomenal growth is largely credited to Certified Healthy Family Specialists (CHFSs). Despite their contributions, the job and working conditions of the CHFSs have rarely been explored from the insiders’ perspective. In this study, we aim to delineate CHFSs’ job and working conditions from their own narratives in order to improve an understanding of CHFSs’ profession and work environment. We conducted in-depth interviews with nine CHFSs and a focus-group interview with five CHFSs. Our findings revealed that CHFSs took pride in their professions, internalized their professional mission of enhancing family strengths, and highlighted CHFSs’ unique professional role in comparison to other human services professionals. In conclusion, CHFSs showed a strong professional identity consisting of rich professional knowledge, solid career goals, and integrated socio-political values. Contrary to the positive perception of the CHFSs’ job, CHFSs expressed challenges in their working conditions in terms of small-scale organizations at local Healthy Family Support Centers, a heavy workload, hierarchical relationships with local government officers, and the unsatisfactory payroll and promotion system. This study contributes to a better understanding of CHFSs’ job and their working conditions and provides insights on how to enhance professionalism among CHFSs and their work environment. As for policy implications, we suggest advancing qualifications for CHFSs, improving professional training programs for current CHFSs, and expanding small-scale organizations.

Are Parent Education Programs in South Korea Really Effective? : A Meta-Analytic Study Using Journal Articles

The purpose of this study was to investigate whether parent education programs conducted in South Korea were effective in changing in parents` behaviors, parents` internal characteristics, and children`s characteristics. We retrieved journal articles published in Korea between 2006 and 2011 using keyword searches of electronic databases. A total of 41 studies were included in our meta-analyses. The results showed that parent education programs had large positive effects on parents` behavioral changes and children`s changes along with medium to large effects on parents` internal changes. The strengths of effect sizes varied depending upon program characteristics including children`s age, the number of participants, participants` gender, the number of sessions, and group characteristics. This study provided powerful scientific evidence for public policies and services that aim to support and empower parents by providing parent education programs.

Family Life Education in South Korea

Family life education (FLE) in South Korea (officially the Republic of Korea; Korea hereafter) has developed and expanded within a short period of time, mirroring the country’s rapid changes in the past few decades. In this chapter, we first present the background of FLE in Korea by providing an overview of the socioeconomic, historical, and cultural contexts along with recent demographic changes related to families (e.g., the decline in fertility rates to the world’s lowest level, the increase in transnational marriages between Korean men and non-Korean wives). The second part focuses on the main providers of FLE programs, Healthy Family Support Centers and Multicultural Family Support Centers, that were created as a result of new family policies developed in the 2000s. It is discussed how these Centers and related organizations design, implement, and evaluate FLE programs and what types of programs they provide. FLE is also explained in other contexts including government-initiated parenting education; FLE in secondary and higher educational systems; FLE in academic, religious, and other nongovernmental settings; and FLE-related certification. Finally, current challenges of FLE in Korea and future directions are discussed. Throughout this chapter, the focus is on FLE programs with structured curriculum except for FLE in the formal education system because they are the most typical type of FLE in Korea.

Perceived Helicopter Parenting and Korean Emerging Adults’ Psychological Adjustment: The Mediational Role of Parent–Child Affection and Pressure from Parental Career Expectations

Examining helicopter parenting in a Confucian culture that values parental authority and involvement can extend previous helicopter parenting research that has mostly focused on a U.S. college student context. In this study, we aim to help clarify the mixed results in the literature regarding the psychological outcomes of helicopter parenting in emerging adulthood by examining the processes underlying the relationship between helicopter parenting and psychological adjustment in the Korean context. Using a diverse sample of Korean emerging adults, we investigated the relationships among perceived helicopter parenting, parent–child affection, pressure from parental career expectations, and psychological adjustment (depressive symptoms and life satisfaction). The data came from 562 Korean emerging adults (269 women and 293 men) aged 19–34 years who were either full-time students or unemployed and unmarried and had at least one living parent. The structural equation modeling used in this study revealed that higher levels of helicopter parenting were directly associated with greater depressive symptoms. Higher levels of helicopter parenting also had an indirect relationship with greater depressive symptoms through higher levels of pressure from parental career expectations. However, higher levels of helicopter parenting were indirectly linked to better psychological adjustment (fewer depressive symptoms, greater satisfaction with life) through higher levels of parent–child affection. Our results indicate that in the East Asian context, helicopter parenting could be related to both negative and positive psychological outcomes depending on the mediating factors.