Thomas S. Weisner

My Brother's Keeper: Child and Sibling Caretaking [and Comments and Reply]

Children often act as caretakers responsible for other children. Such child caretaking varies widely in its frequency, as well as in the degree of institutionalization, relationship to parental caretaking, degree of indulgence, and incidence at differing ages. Residence and household patterns, size of the family, and the subsistence economy, daily routines, and work load of the family are important in determining availability of child caretakers in the home. The United States appears to have fewer alternative caretakers available, and less child caretaking, than most societies. Child caretaking is related to a number of developmental areas during childhood; eight are suggestedin this review: (1) mother-child relationships and attachment; (2) conceptions and emergence of childhood stages; (3) formation and organization of play groups; (4) development of social responsibility; (5) sex differences; (6) development of individual diferences; (7) development of cognitive-style differences; and (8) motivation and classroom performance.

The social construction and subjective reality of activity settings: Implications for community psychology

A major focus of the article is the idea that activity settings are in part social constructions of the participants. The socially constructed “meaning” of an activity setting is a complex mix of ecological, cultural, interactional, and psychological features. These features may be observed and assessed, directly and indirectly, in terms of personnel, cultural values, tasks, scripts for conduct, and motives and purposes of actors. Empirical illustrations and extensions to community psychology are drawn from research with different populations: Native Hawaiian children and families, Spanish-speaking children and Mexican and Central American immigrant parents, Euro-American families with a developmentally delayed child, and Euro-American families who intentionally adopted nonconventional child-rearing values and practices.

Outcome correlates of parent-child bedsharing: An eighteen-year longitudinal study

ABSTRACT. We report results of the first longitudinal study of outcome correlates of parent-child bedsharing. Two hundred five families in nonconventional and conventional family lifestyles have been followed since 1975. A target child in each family was followed from the third trimester of mother’s pregnancy through age 18 years. Bedsharing in early childhood was found to be significantly associated with increased cognitive competence measured at age 6 years, but the effect size was small. At age 6 years, bedsharing in infancy and early childhood was not associated with sleep problems, sexual pathology, or any other problematic consequences. At age 18 years, bedsharing in infancy and childhood was unrelated to pathology or problematic consequences, nor was it related to beneficial consequences. We discuss these results in light of widespread fears of harm caused by parent-child bedsharing. We suggest that such fears are without warrant if bedsharing is practiced safely as part of a complex of valued and related family practices.

Ecocultural Theory as a Context for the Individual Family Service Plan

Although PL 99-457 mandates a family focus to early intervention, there is a limited theoretical and empirical base to guide implementation of the new law. Ecocultural theory, which considers the sociocultural environment of the child and family, is proposed as a framework for designing intervention. To illustrate this theory, case material is selected from two ongoing longitudinal studies of families with young children with developmental delays, etiologies unknown or uncertain. Several aspects of ecocultural theory are used to illustrate its usefulness for intervention: a social constructivist perspective; the interconnected and hierarchical nature of the ecocultural niche; and the use of family-level outcomes as well as individual child outcomes. Implications for developing Individual Family Service Plans are discussed.

Sustainability of Daily Routines as a Family Outcome

A mother of a nine-year-old boy says . . . . “Monday, I do carpool duty and so I have to drive into Burbank. I pick up my [age 11] son at 1:00, then we dash over to Burbank and pick up 6 kids and they all get off at different times. Even on days that it’s not my carpool day, I still have an hour and fifteen minutes drive to pick up my son. Some days it’s really hectic. There are days when I have a night class, so we stop and get dinner on the way home, but that’s only one day a week. Then, we do homework, I get the kids bathed and in bed. And we found a new, more appropriate school for [my daughter]. We have an impossible schedule. We had to reshuffle our whole lives. We had to give up a lot to have her go to this school, but I felt like for years we’d given up so much to take care of my son’s therapy and she [the older sister] was miserable. I thought we’ve got to try something else. Every once in a while, I get really tired of the 2 hour drive, and then my daughter will say ‘Please, I’ll do anything, don’t pull me from the school. I’ve never been happier in my life.’ Well, as a result, I get up at 4:30 in the morning, and then I don’t get to bed until after midnight. We probably have the worst life of all the parents in your study. We are going to die young. As far as sleep, we don’t sleep. We exist. I’m lucky, because I’m kind of a night person, but we tend to get sick easily.”

Impacts on Children of a Policy to Promote Employment and Reduce Poverty for Low-Income Parents: New Hope After 5 Years.

The impacts of New Hope, a program to increase parent employment and reduce poverty, were measured 5 years after parents were randomly assigned to program or control groups. New Hope had positive effects on childrens school achievement, motivation, and social behavior, primarily for boys, across the age range 6-16. In comparison to impacts measured 2 years after program onset, effects on achievement were robust, but effects on social behavior were reduced. The program produced improvements in family income and use of organized child care and activity settings, suggesting possible pathways by which the New Hope package of policies influenced childrens behavior.

A Good Friend is Hard to Find: Friendship Among Adolescents With Disabilities

We asked 27 Euro American teens ages 16 to 17 with developmental disabilities in Los Angeles to describe friendships. Eleven characteristics of friendship reported in the research literature (similarity, proximity, transcending context, companionship, reciprocity, mutuality, intimacy, support, trust/loyalty, conflict management, and stability) were mentioned by at least some teens. However, most teens focused on companionship, doing activities across contexts, similarity in interests/personality, sheer proximity, and stability. Gender did not influence number or types of themes reported. Teens with higher IQ/Vineland Communication scores mentioned more friendship themes and were less positive about their friendships. Most teens reported some satisfying friendships, and friendships between peers with developmental disability usually were more stable and positive than friendships with typically developing peers.

Comparing Sibling Relationships Across Cultures

The essays on siblings collected in this volume vividly show cross-cultural differences in sibling caretaking (Chapters 3, 4, and 5), in language development (Chapters 3, 4, and 5), and in play interaction (Chapters 3 and 5). The North American samples (Chapters 6, 7, 8, and 9) address many of the same topics, including folk perceptions of siblings and sibling roles; caretaking patterns; and friendship and support among sibs.

What Ever Happened to N‐of‐1 Trials? Insiders' Perspectives and a Look to the Future

CONTEXT When feasible, randomized, blinded single-patient (n-of-1) trials are uniquely capable of establishing the best treatment in an individual patient. Despite early enthusiasm, by the turn of the twenty-first century, few academic centers were conducting n-of-1 trials on a regular basis. METHODS The authors reviewed the literature and conducted in-depth telephone interviews with leaders in the n-of-1 trial movement. FINDINGS N-of-1 trials can improve care by increasing therapeutic precision. However, they have not been widely adopted, in part because physicians do not sufficiently value the reduction in uncertainty they yield weighed against the inconvenience they impose. Limited evidence suggests that patients may be receptive to n-of-1 trials once they understand the benefits. CONCLUSIONS N-of-1 trials offer a unique opportunity to individualize clinical care and enrich clinical research. While ongoing changes in drug discovery, manufacture, and marketing may ultimately spur pharmaceutical makers and health care payers to support n-of-1 trials, at present the most promising resuscitation strategy is stripping n-of-1 trials to their essentials and marketing them directly to patients. In order to optimize statistical inference from these trials, empirical Bayes methods can be used to combine individual patient data with aggregate data from comparable patients.

Attachment as a Cultural and Ecological Problem with Pluralistic Solutions

I stood next to a mother who was watching (through a one-way window) her child being assessed in the Strange Situation Procedure (SSP). The child was labeled ‘avoidant,’ according to the child’s behavior profile, at least as identified by the scoring and classification of the child’s attachment. But the mother proudly commented that: ‘This is what I have been working for by having him be with other kids and families while I am working. Look how independent he is! See how he can play by himself?’ This mother was a single parent by choice. She had told us about her goals for independence for herself and her child, the importance of living a profeminist kind of family life, as she defined it, and her efforts to establish an ongoing convoy of friends and caretakers for her child to provide relational support and security. The meaning of the behaviors revealed in the SSP were positive to her, and her construction of the situation reflected a valorizing of her child’s life path as well as the mother’s. For her, the behaviors she saw meant that they both were on a positive, adaptive, virtuous path. Her child was not in fact ‘at risk’ for ‘attachment disorder’ nor relational insecurity in her frame of meaning, whatever the scoring of her child’s behaviors might have been (and in fact, longitudinal follow-up through adolescence did not show any signs of risk either) [Weisner, 1996a, 2001; Weisner & Bernheimer, 1998; Weisner & Garnier, 1992]. Harwood, Miller, and Irizarry [1995] show more systematically than this case example that indigenous perceptions of desirable and undesirable attachment behaviors can and do differ from the labels given to them by the attachment theory. Their study compared Anglo and Puerto Rican mothers from working- and middleclass backgrounds. They found that mothers could prefer behaviors coded as insecure, and disapprove behaviors coded as secure, based on an SSP-type rating procedure. Using vignettes of SSP behaviors, they found that both socioeconomic status