YOUNG CHILDREN'S SOCIAL RELATIONSHIPS WITH SIBLINGS AND FRIENDS

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/72230/1/h0080215.pd

Researching the Determinants of Vulnerability to HIV among Adolescents

Adolescents in sub-Saharan Africa are among the most vulnerable to HIV. Those who reside in households most affected by AIDS are often the most poor and socially disconnected; and many have also been orphaned by one or both parents. Many orphans and vulnerable children (OVC) and youth HIV programmes do not reach these adolescents in meaningful ways. In addition, most programmes do not address the crucial link between orphanhood status, HIV risk, and the need for social and economic support to mitigate their life circumstances. This is especially true for young females, who generally have greater social, economic and health vulnerabilities, and fewer protective assets in these environments. This article highlights research findings that identify the contribution of social capital, poverty, and orphan status to the adolescent experience in the wake of HIV/AIDS, and consequently, to better inform policies and programmes that target and attend to the needs of young people most at risk

Putting Youth on the Map: A Pilot Instrument for Assessing Youth Well-Being

Extant measures of adolescent well-being in the United States typically focus on negative indicators of youth outcomes. Indices comprised of such measures paint bleak views of youth and orient action toward the prevention of problems over the promotion of protective factors. Their tendency to focus analyses at a state or county geographic scale produces limited information about localized outcome patterns that could inform policymakers, practitioners and advocacy networks. We discuss the construction of a new geo-referenced index of youth well-being based on positive indicators of youth development. In demonstrating the index for the greater Sacramento, California region of the United States, we find that overall youth well-being falls far short of an optimal outcome, and geographic disparities in well-being appear to exist across school districts at all levels of our analysis. Despite its limitations, the sub-county geographic scale of this index provides needed data to facilitate local and regional interventions

Learning to Learn From Stories: Children's Developing Sensitivity to the Causal Structure of Fictional Worlds

Fiction presents a unique challenge to the developing child, in that children must learn when to generalize information from stories to the real world. This study examines how children acquire causal knowledge from storybooks, and whether children are sensitive to how closely the fictional world resembles reality. Preschoolers (N = 108) listened to stories in which a novel causal relation was embedded within realistic or fantastical contexts. Results indicate that by at least 3 years of age, children are sensitive to the underlying causal structure of the story: Children are more likely to generalize content if the fictional world is similar to reality. Additionally, children become better able at discriminating between realistic and fantastical story contexts between 3 and 5 years of age

Position exchange: the social development of agency

Human agency can be defined in terms of acting independently of the immediate situation. Humans have a considerable independence from immediate situational demands because, on the one hand, they are able to distanciate from ongoing activity and reflect upon it, while on the other hand, they are able to identify with other people in different situations. It is argued that this form of agency arises through intersubjectivity because intersubjectivity enables the actor to take a perspective outside of the immediate situation and thus extricating the actor from the immediate situation. The paper contributes to the question of how intersubjectivity, as the basis of agency, develops. Explanations from phenomenology, child development and mirror neuron research are critically reviewed and the novel idea of position exchange is advanced. The paper concludes by examining some of the implications of position exchange for our understanding of the development of agency focusing upon mirror neurons, role play and autism