“I’m meant to be his comfort blanket, not a punching bag” – Ethnomimesis as an exploration of maternal child to parent violence in pre-adolescents

This is the first study to use ethno-mimesis to explore the lived experiences of mothers navigating child-to-parent violence initiated by pre-adolescent children. The current child-to-parent violence research landscape is predominantly focused upon the experiences of parents of adolescent children, identifying that violent behaviours can be used as a life-long strategy. This research uses innovative methods to explore the lived experiences of mothers, and how they understand and navigate the violence of their pre-adolescent child. Using ethno-mimesis to allow for the intersection of socio-cultural theory (social roles and expectations); experience (reflection on motherhood); and practice (creating visual representations), five mother experiencing child-to-parent violence were identified and recruited from three parent support groups in the North of England. These mothers individually reflected on their experiences of violence, as mothers with young children, with responses thematically analyzed underpinned by phenomenological inquiry. Mothers in this research identified the violence as a symptom of wider structural, neurological, or mental health difficulties their child was experiencing rather than the problem itself. Participants did not believe the violence was intentional but was due to uncontrollable and overwhelming emotions. Nevertheless, there was considerable overlap between the experiences of these mothers and previous research into maternal experiences of adolescent violence; maternal experiences of adult child-to-parent violence, and intimate partner violence. By understanding the behaviours of younger children, there is opportunity to provide whole-family interventions which will prevent lifecourse trajectories, and focus upon the challenges and support needs of mothers living with this form of violence and abuse

Explosive and Harmful Impulses: A Subset of Child and Adolescent-to-Parent Violence and Abuse

“Filial harm” refers to harms experienced by a parent and caused by their child, with increasing umbrella terminology developing to capture all forms of harm despite differing experiences and contexts. In this paper, based on a Glaserian Grounded Theory study underpinned by participatory research principles, this work utilized diaries and interactive interviews with 34 parents and arts-based workshops with 21 children to develop a new terminology and approach to child and adolescent-to-parent violence and abuse when harm does not have a clear intent. Explosive and harmful impulses refer to preadolescents experiencing proactive, reactive, affective, and relational harms and needs. These specific forms of filial harm are based upon underlying needs, and the maladaptive ways children may attempt to meet their needs result in filial harm as an unintended consequence rather than being a form of harm with intent. Using an approach that captures subsections of filial harm, there is opportunity to better represent the nuance of individual family experiences and could provide more appropriate language and interventions that better represent the language used by families themselves. Future interventions, support pathways, and research with families living with explosive and harmful impulses could use the provided framework to understand why children are attempting to meet their needs in harmful ways and to consider less harmful methods of support

“It’s like living in a house with constant tremors, and every so often, there’s an earthquake” A Glaserian Grounded Theory study into harm to parents, caused by the explosive and controlling impulses of their pre-adolescent children

Children instigating harms, particularly in pre-adolescence, contradict our conceptualisations of what children ‘should’ be and how they ‘should’ behave. This creates further dissonance when the harm is inflicted upon parents and is often shrouded in silence and shame. As such, there is little known about the earliest indicators of child-to-parent violence, and this research was an attempt to improve this knowledge. Using a Glaserian Grounded Theory approach, underpinned by participatory principles, I worked alongside individuals from families who were living with child-to-parent violence. Through exploring their everyday experiences, I sought to identify the main concern of the substantive population (families living with childto-parent violence) and identify how they attempted to resolve this main concern. 34 parents living with child-to-parent violence engaged in diary-based methods and interactive interviews; whilst 21 pre-adolescent children instigating these harms were involved in weekly arts-based workshops. These two methods assisted in the generation of the ‘rescaling Grounded Theory’. A Delphi method with experts-by-experience and expert practitioners, alongside extant literature, was used to test the boundaries of the theory and its respective framework. This thesis presents rescaling in a ‘nested’ way with all chapters revolving around the respective chapter, rather than as a ‘big book’. The rescaling process involves the social space in which each family member takes up, and how they adapt to one another whilst attempting to achieve the idealised ‘good parent’ or ‘good child’ identity. Furthermore, ‘child-to-parent violence and abuse’ was identified as an umbrella term which captures all forms of harm to a parent caused by their child; whereas ‘explosive and controlling impulses’ is introduced as a new term for harms instigated by children which does not involve an effort to control a parent but are an attempt to meet a specific need in the child but result in harm to others

The role of ‘friendship as method’ with child co-researchers in the primary school environment

Within social science research the complex nature of relationship-making and ‘friendship as method’ has gained enthusiasm. However, there is still a significant lack of research on ‘friendship as method’ with children and young people in participatory studies. Drawing on empirical case studies, we ask: how does ‘friendship as method’ work in research with children? The paper considers the role of vulnerability and reservations, friendship facilitator, and discusses the ethical dimensions of creating and sustaining ‘friendships’ between researcher and participants (as co-researchers). We argue that friendships in research are not a hierarchical or linear continuum, but a spectrum: friendships often mean different things to different people at different times; they can be positive and negative, both liberating and restrictive, fleeting and sustained, energising and tiresome. We recommend that participatory research with children considers not only the participatory components of power and action, but the emotionality and relationality of participatory research with children

Managing violent behaviours in primary schools – A multi-agency risk assessment model

Awareness of childhood violence is growing globally. It is estimated that almost a quarter of teachers are assaulted by their pupils each week in the UK, with many of these children identified as having social, emotional, and mental health needs. These pupils are increasingly likely to be excluded from school. When compared with violence and aggression from adults, there is a poor level of awareness and multi-agency co-ordination when risk-assessing violence and aggression from children. In this article, I posit that risk models applied to adult violence and aggression, particularly multi-agency risk assessment conferences (MARAC), should be applied to childhood presentations of violence and aggression, thus expanding knowledge and providing additional resources for early identification and support. Through a child-centred MARAC, there is opportunity for schools to remove responsibility from the teachers, placing it with multi-agency units. Units which can collate information on families, and provision, directed services to holistically support families, and consequently schools

Responding to Child and Adolescent to Parent Violence and Abuse from a Distance: Remote Delivery of Interventions during Covid-19

Working with families living with child and adolescent-to-parent violence raises a number of challenges which were compounded during the Covid-19 pandemic. In this article, UK umbrella organisation ‘Respect’ is used as a case study to explore how 10 practitioners navigated social, emotional, and safeguarding concerns that occurred when transitioning to remote working. Engagement with children and young people proved difficult, especially for those with special education needs and/or disabilities. However, parental engagement with services increased. Practitioners were quick to adapt to the changing landscape of remote working; continually adapting their practice to otherwise unforeseen safeguarding and/or practical challenges

We Need to be as a Group: Using and Evaluating the Listening Guide in Feminist Collaborative Autoethnography With an Affective ‘Fifth Listen’ as a Tool to (re)construct Identities

As a UK-based group of female postgraduate researchers, the authors explored their experiences during COVID-19 pandemic through multivocal inquiry via a feminist collaborative autoethnographic project. In this paper, we use the Listening Guide as a tool to revisit and (re)analyse data from the aforementioned project, displaying findings in the form of voice poems. In utilising the Listening Guide, we discovered that listening is less of an exercise and more an art form. While the structured approach of the LG helped to enhance our understandings of wider individual experiences of disability and womanhood, identities that all authors inhabit, we were surprised to find that despite our established mutual trust and superficially similar experiences, we were unable to find emotional resonance through data that wasn’t our own voice. We also found that the traditional stepped process of the LG that incorporates four listens to the data left our interpretations feeling flat. Through reflexivity and the novel collaborative approach we undertook in this analysis, we identified and implemented an augmentation of the Listening Guide process. In this paper, we propose an additional fifth listen, focusing on emotion, to facilitate a more holistic analysis of voice data. We explore how the fifth listen assisted the (re)construction of individual and collective identities, helping us to reshape our understandings. Finally, we elucidate the positives and pitfalls we experienced in the Listening Guide as a data analysis tool, recommending to other researchers the adoption of an iterative, flexible and reflexive approach in using it during collaborative research

Investigating speech and language impairments in delirium: a preliminary case-control study

<div><p>Introduction</p><p>Language impairment is recognized as as part of the delirium syndrome, yet there is little neuropsychological research on the nature of this dysfunction. Here we hypothesized that patients with delirium show impairments in language formation, coherence and comprehension.</p><p>Methods</p><p>This was a case-control study in 45 hospitalized patients (aged 65–97 years) with delirium, dementia without delirium, or no cognitive impairment (N = 15 per group). DSM-5 criteria were used for delirium. Speech was elicited during (1) structured conversational questioning, and (2) the "Cookie Theft" picture description task. Language comprehension was assessed through standardized verbal and written commands. Interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed.</p><p>Results</p><p>Delirium and dementia groups scored lower on the conversational assessment than the control group (p<0.01, moderate effect sizes (r) of 0.48 and 0.51, resp.). In the Cookie Theft task, the average length of utterances (i.e. unit of speech), indicating language productivity and fluency, distinguished patients with delirium from those with dementia (p<0.01, r = 0.50) and no cognitive impairment (p<0.01, r = 0.55). Patients with delirium performed worse on written comprehension tests compared to cognitively unimpaired patients (p<0.01, r = 0.63), but not compared to the dementia group.</p><p>Conclusions</p><p>Production of spontaneous speech, word quantity, speech content and verbal and written language comprehension are impaired in delirious patients compared to cognitively unimpaired patients. Additionally, patients with delirium produced significantly less fluent speech than those with dementia. These findings have implications for how speech and language are evaluated in delirium assessments, and also for communication with patients with delirium. A study limitation was that the delirium group included patients with co-morbid dementia, which precludes drawing conclusions about the specific language profile of delirium.</p></div