Negotiating grandmothering, paid employment and regular childcare in urban Aotearoa New Zealand : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Public Health at Massey University, Manawatū, New Zealand

Listed in 2021 Dean's List of Exceptional ThesesGrandmothers are increasingly called upon to provide regular childcare to enable parents to engage in paid employment. Many of these grandmothers are in paid employment themselves. Combining paid employment and regular childcare is managed in the context of their lives, which includes family relationships and broader societal expectations for older women. This thesis examined the experience of grandmothers living in Auckland City, who were in paid employment at least twenty hours a week and who provided regular weekly childcare of at least ten hours a week to their grandchildren. This research was based on feminist poststructuralism. Poststructuralism focusses on multiplicity and subjectivity, attending to the wider contexts in which language is located. Feminist poststructuralism focusses on gender and how gendered norms describe and establish the ‘right’ ways of behaving. These expectations contribute to assumptions that the accommodation of childcare and paid work is normal and natural for women. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with fifteen grandmothers and their accounts were analysed using narrative analysis. Narrative analysis focusses on the importance of stories as the primary way in which people make sense of their lives. These stories draw on wider social, cultural, political and gendered narratives. The analysis found that paid employment was particularly important in the participants’ lives, allowing for the construction of an identity which was different to a grandmother-focussed identity. This importance of paid employment also shaped participants’ understandings of the importance of paid employment in the lives of mothers; maternal paid employment was constructed as important for wellbeing and for enabling an identity different to that of ‘mother’. Two clear intentions for providing childcare were storied: supporting maternal paid employment, and childcare as a response to concerns about grandchildren’s wellbeing. Finally, holding multiple roles and balancing paid employment and childcare were storied as the juggling of identities rather than the juggling of the tasks involved in combining paid work and childcare. The research findings have contributed to how grandmothering is understood; it has contextualised participants’ experiences in wider societal expectations for how women can and should combine their paid employment and family lives in later life

Parent abuse: Can law be the answer?

© Cambridge University Press 2012This article reviews the different forms of legal interventions which may be available to address parent abuse. It seeks to examine the evidence as to which are actually used currently and the problems which are inherent in them. We do this both by examining the statutory basis of the existing potential legal remedies and reported cases relating to those provisions, and by drawing on evidence from a small-scale study of relevant professional workers in one city. We conclude that while recourse to the police, and hence potentially the criminal justice system, is most frequent in practice, the criminal justice system is not suited to tackling the issue. Other interventions, such as anti-social behaviour orders and injunctions, also reveal problems. Law struggles to find an effective response to such a complex problem. Notwithstanding the acknowledged limits of law in changing behaviour, we argue that law could be used more effectively to reduce the incidence and impact of parent abuse

Treatment of type 2 diabetes: future approaches

Introduction or background Type 2 diabetes, which accounts for ~90% of all diabetes, is a heterogeneous and progressive disease with a variety of causative and potentiating factors. The hyperglycaemia of type 2 diabetes is often inadequately controlled, hence the need for a wider selection of glucose-lowering treatments. Sources of data Medline, PubMed, Web of Science and Google Scholar. Areas of agreement Early, effective and sustained control of blood glucose defers the onset and reduces the severity of microvascular and neuropathic complications of type 2 diabetes and helps to reduce the risk of cardiovascular (CV) complications. Areas of controversy Newer glucose-lowering agents require extensive long-term studies to confirm CV safety. The positioning of newer agents within therapeutic algorithms varies. Growing points In addition to their glucose-lowering efficacy, some new glucose-lowering agents may act independently to reduce CV and renal complications. Areas timely for developing research Studies of potential new glucose-lowering agents offer the opportunity to safely improve glycaemic control with prolonged efficacy and greater opportunity for therapeutic individualisation

Transdifferentiation from cornea to lens in Xenopus laevis depends on BMP signalling and involves upregulation of Wnt signalling

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Surgical removal of the lens from larval <it>Xenopus laevis </it>results in a rapid transdifferention of central corneal cells to form a new lens. The trigger for this process is understood to be an induction event arising from the unprecedented exposure of the cornea to the vitreous humour that occurs following lens removal. The molecular identity of this trigger is unknown.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Here, we have used a functional transgenic approach to show that BMP signalling is required for lens regeneration and a microarray approach to identify genes that are upregulated specifically during this process. Analysis of the array data strongly implicates Wnt signalling and the Pitx family of transcription factors in the process of cornea to lens transdifferentiation. Our analysis also captured several genes associated with congenital cataract in humans. Pluripotency genes, in contrast, were not upregulated, supporting the idea that corneal cells transdifferentiate without returning to a stem cell state. Several genes from the array were expressed in the forming lens during embryogenesis. One of these, <it>Nipsnap1</it>, is a known direct target of BMP signalling.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>Our results strongly implicate the developmental Wnt and BMP signalling pathways in the process of cornea to lens transdifferentiation (CLT) in <it>Xenopus</it>, and suggest direct transdifferentiation between these two anterior eye tissues.</p

Johannesburg Northen suburbs women's attitudes, knowledge and behaviour towards breast self-examination

A research report submitted to the Faculty of Medicine, University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in partial fulfilment of the requirements for a degree of Masters of Family medicine. Johannesburg, 1998Breast self-examination (BSE) is a recommended' breast cancer screening behaviour whereby a woman examines her breasts un a monthly basis to detect any problems. [ Abbreviated abstract : Open document to view full version]GR201

Evaluation of a peer led parenting intervention for disruptive behaviour problems in children: community based randomised controlled trial

Objective To evaluate the effectiveness of a peer led parenting intervention delivered to socially disadvantaged families. Design Randomised controlled trial. Setting Schools and children’s centres in a socially deprived borough of inner London. Participants Parental caregivers seeking help with managing the problem behaviours of 116 index children, aged 2-11 years; 59 families were randomised to the intervention and 57 to a waitlist control condition. Intervention Empowering parents, empowering communities is an eight week (two hours each week), manualised programme delivered to groups of parents by trained peer facilitators from the local community. Main outcome measures Child problems (number and severity), parental stress, and parenting competencies were assessed before and after the intervention using standardised parent reported measures. Results Significantly greater improvements in positive parenting practices and child problems were observed in the intervention group compared with the waitlist group, with no difference in parental stress between the groups. An intention to treat analysis for the primary outcome measure, the intensity subscale of the Eyberg child behaviour inventory, showed an intervention effect size of 0.38 (95% confidence interval 0.01 to 0.75, P=0.01). The intervention group had high rates of treatment retention (91.5%) and user satisfaction. Conclusion The peer led parenting intervention significantly reduced child behaviour problems and improved parenting competencies. This is a promising method for providing effective and acceptable parenting support to families considered hard to reach by mainstream services

‘Every day is hard, being outside, but you have to do it for your child’: mixed-methods formative evaluation of a peer-led parenting intervention for homeless families

We conducted a mixed-methods, formative evaluation of a peer-led parenting intervention for homeless families. Participants were parents living in temporary accommodation with self-identified difficulties related to parenting an index child aged 2–11 years. An evidence-based programme (‘Empowering Parents, Empowering Communities’) was adapted for delivery with the target population in London, UK. We assessed feasibility in terms of session attendance rate, intervention completion rate and potential for impact on a range of parent-reported outcomes measures. Acceptability and appropriateness were examined by a user satisfaction measure and qualitative interviews. The intervention was delivered across three group cohorts (N = 15). Thirteen parents completed the programme (including one parent who required two attempts). We found improvements in child behavioural difficulties, parenting knowledge and practices, while parental well-being and social support were unchanged. Participants were highly satisfied overall, with indications that the peer-led model mitigated negative expectancies of services and normalized experiences of parenting in challenging conditions. Parental self-care and ‘the good enough parent’ were strongly endorsed topics, although some content (e.g. timeout) was deemed impractical. These promising findings warrant further testing under controlled conditions