Meaning in Life of Terminally Ill Parent with Young Children – A Quantitative Evaluation with SMiLE

Background Increasing the quality of life is one of the objectives of palliative care. Meaning in life has a significant influence on the perceived quality of life. We found no studies focusing on patients with young children.Methods Young parents diagnosed with life-limiting disease could participate and create an audiobook. Patients were assessed using Schedule for Meaning in Life Evaluaton (SMiLE) pre and post intervention. The SMiLE is a validated instrument to assess meaning in life. Patients list their individual items that provide meaning in life. In a second step they are requested to rate their current level of satisfaction and in a last step they are asked to rank the importance of each item. Overall indices of weighting, satisfaction and importance are calculated. In addition, participants were interviewed twice over the course regarding expectations, concerns, motivation, and experiences.ResultsThe data were collected from February 2017 till September 2020. Fifty-four patients with ninety-six children at a mean age of seven years could be included. The involvement with the SMiLE made patients think about their resources. Most important items were in decreasing order family (100%), social relations (79.6%), leisure time (61.1%), nature/animals (38.9%), and home/garden (29.6%). Index of weighting (IOW) was 81.5, index of satisfaction (IOS) was 71.4, and a total SMiLE Index (IOWS) was 72.4. Parent felt limited by their illness in being a mother or father, as they wanted to be.ConclusionItems relevant for young parent showed differences to evaluations of cancer patients and palliative care patients. Most important item for meaning in life is the family numerated by all participants. The results indicate that evaluation of meaning in life is a coping strategy and helps young parent with young children.

Social media and online safety practices of young parents

Studies of parents’ online safety concerns typically centre on information privacy and on worries over unknown third parties preying on children, whereas investigations into youth perspectives on online safety have found young people to focus on threats to safety or reputation by known individuals. The case of youth who are themselves parents raises questions regarding how these differing perspectives are negotiated by individuals who are in dual roles as youth and parents. Using interview and ethnographic observation data from the longitudinal Young Parent Study in British Columbia, Canada, this analysis investigates social media and online safety practices of 113 young parents. Online safety concerns of young parents in this study focused on personal safety, their children’s online privacy and image management. These concerns reflect their dual roles, integrating youth image and information management concerns with parental concerns over the safety and information privacy of their own children.

Beneficial cumulative effects of old parental age on offspring fitness

Old parental age is commonly associated with negative effects on offspring life-history traits. Such parental senescence effects are predicted to have a cumulative detrimental effect over successive generations. However, old parents may benefit from producing higher quality offspring when these compete for seasonal resources. Thus, old parents may choose to increase investment in their offspring, thereby producing fewer but larger and more competitive progeny. We show that Caenorhabditis elegans hermaphrodites increase parental investment with advancing age, resulting in fitter offspring who reach their reproductive peak earlier. Remarkably, these effects increased over six successive generations of breeding from old parents and were subsequently reversed following a single generation of breeding from a young parent. Our findings support the hypothesis that offspring of old parents receive more resources and convert them into increasingly faster life histories. These results contradict the theory that old parents transfer a cumulative detrimental ‘ageing factor’ to their offspring.

Young-parent communication on sexual and reproductive health issues among young female night students in Amhara region, Ethiopia: Community-based cross-sectional study

Background Young is a key stage in rapid biological and psychosocial changes affecting every aspect of the lives and an important time to set the foundation for good health in adulthood. Adolescent-parent communication is a potential path for improving sexual and reproductive health outcomes for adolescents, most of parents did not teach their adolescents about sexual and reproductive health. Even though, some researches have been done on day time students, there is no study conducted focusing on young girls attending night school in Ethiopia. Objective This study aimed to assess young-parent communication on sexual and reproductive health issues and associated factors among night female students in Amhara Region, Ethiopia, 2018. Method School based quantitative cross-sectional study was employed in Amhara region among 1640 young female night students from September 15 to November 15/2018. Face-to-face interview-administered questionnaires were used to collect the data. Bi-variable and multi-variable logistic regression model were used. Odds ratio (OR) with 95% confidence interval (CI) were computed to determine the strength of association between predictor and outcome variables. P-values less than 0.05 considered as level of significance. Results One hundred ten (37.5%) of the students had communication with their parents on at least two issues of sexual and reproductive health (SRH) issues in the last 6 months. Grade level (adjusted odd ratio (AOR) = 2.61, 95% CI (2.04, 3.34)), marital status (AOR = 1.29, 95% CI (1.03, 1.63), living arrangement (AOR = 1.50(1.13, 2.00)), utilization of youth friendly sexual and reproductive health services (AOR = 1.80, 95% CI (1.41, 2.30)), students ever had sexual intercourse (AOR = 1.50, 95% CI (1.23, 1.96)), Information about sexual and reproductive health services (AOR = 1.45(1.16, 1.80)) were associated young-parents communication on sexual and reproductive health issues. Conclusion In this study young-parent communications on sexual and reproductive health (SRH) issues was found to be limited. Therefore, teachers, health extension workers, and health professionals should strengthen comprehensive SRH education for students in school, churches, mosques, health facilities and encouraging them to participate in different health clubs in school. Parent should give education for their children sexual and reproductive health during the era of young age.

“With an Ear to the Line”: An Auditory Reading of Seamus Heaney’s Wintering Out (1972)

<p><b>Abstract </b></p><p>The Irish Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney (1939-2013) is arguably one of the most widely read, studied and translated poets of our time. Sound − in all its manifestations, literal and metaphorical, including silence − is referenced throughout his poetry and prose. From the rasping sound of his father’s spade to the shunting of trains; from the gurgling of the local river to the silence of bogs and bog-bodies; from the noise of tractors and airplanes to the quietude of lakes and canals, moments of sound and silence inspire and define not only Heaney’s poems but also our experience of them. As Heaney himself indicates, listening was a way for him not only of perceiving the surrounding world but also reaching out and staying in touch with the wideness of the world. In his Nobel Lecture (1995), Heaney recalls how as a child he would take in “everything that was going on” beyond the walls, from “the sounds of the horse in the stable at night, the voices of adults conversation from the kitchen”, “a steam train rumbling along the railway line one field back from his house” to the “bursts of foreign languages” coming from the radio. </p><p>This study combines the linguistic and literary practice of close reading with ecological theories of auditory perception and soundscape interpretation to map and analyse references to sounds − and their absence − in Wintering Out (1972). This collection has been chosen because it was published at a transitional stage in the poet’s personal and professional life. Heaney’s third collection is born out of everyday childhood memories and his concerns about identity, territory, language, religion and history. It documents the poet’s standpoint in relation to the Troubles, his anxieties as a young parent, his hopes for the appreciation of the common ground and his confidence about his vocation as a poet. Wintering Out echoes the poet’s thoughts and concerns through moments of sound and silence. </p><p>Historically, studies of sounds and audition have been informed by a concern with the understanding of music and the physical attributes of sound waves − e.g. amplitude, frequency, timbre. Studies of sounds in poetry have focused primarily on understanding prosody and the relationship between poetry and music. This acoustic study of Heaney’s Wintering Out sets out to demonstrate that references to sounds in poetry are not only guided by a feel for the sounds of words but also by a strong sense of places and times they evoke, and thus, can be socially, culturally, and personally charged and meaningful. </p>

“With an Ear to the Line”: An Auditory Reading of Seamus Heaney’s Wintering Out (1972)

<p><b>Abstract </b></p><p>The Irish Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney (1939-2013) is arguably one of the most widely read, studied and translated poets of our time. Sound − in all its manifestations, literal and metaphorical, including silence − is referenced throughout his poetry and prose. From the rasping sound of his father’s spade to the shunting of trains; from the gurgling of the local river to the silence of bogs and bog-bodies; from the noise of tractors and airplanes to the quietude of lakes and canals, moments of sound and silence inspire and define not only Heaney’s poems but also our experience of them. As Heaney himself indicates, listening was a way for him not only of perceiving the surrounding world but also reaching out and staying in touch with the wideness of the world. In his Nobel Lecture (1995), Heaney recalls how as a child he would take in “everything that was going on” beyond the walls, from “the sounds of the horse in the stable at night, the voices of adults conversation from the kitchen”, “a steam train rumbling along the railway line one field back from his house” to the “bursts of foreign languages” coming from the radio. </p><p>This study combines the linguistic and literary practice of close reading with ecological theories of auditory perception and soundscape interpretation to map and analyse references to sounds − and their absence − in Wintering Out (1972). This collection has been chosen because it was published at a transitional stage in the poet’s personal and professional life. Heaney’s third collection is born out of everyday childhood memories and his concerns about identity, territory, language, religion and history. It documents the poet’s standpoint in relation to the Troubles, his anxieties as a young parent, his hopes for the appreciation of the common ground and his confidence about his vocation as a poet. Wintering Out echoes the poet’s thoughts and concerns through moments of sound and silence. </p><p>Historically, studies of sounds and audition have been informed by a concern with the understanding of music and the physical attributes of sound waves − e.g. amplitude, frequency, timbre. Studies of sounds in poetry have focused primarily on understanding prosody and the relationship between poetry and music. This acoustic study of Heaney’s Wintering Out sets out to demonstrate that references to sounds in poetry are not only guided by a feel for the sounds of words but also by a strong sense of places and times they evoke, and thus, can be socially, culturally, and personally charged and meaningful. </p>

Beneficial cumulative effects of old parental age on offspring fitness

Old parental age is commonly associated with negative effects on offspring life-history traits. Such parental effect senescence is predicted to have a cumulative detrimental effect over successive generations. However, old parents may benefit from producing high-quality offspring when these compete for seasonal resources. Thus, old parents may choose to increase investment in their offspring, thereby producing fewer but larger and more competitive progeny. We show that Caenorhabditis elegans hermaphrodites increase parental investment with advancing age, resulting in fitter offspring who reach their reproductive peak earlier. Remarkably, these effects increased over six successive generations of breeding from old parents and were subsequently reversed following a single generation of breeding from a young parent. These results contradict the theory that old parents transfer a cumulative detrimental “ageing factor” to their offspring. Instead, our findings support the hypothesis that offspring of old parents receive more resources and convert them into increasingly faster life-histories.

“We Were Not at School Today”: First-Person Pronouns and Discursive Construction of Identities by Emerging Middle-Class Chinese Parents

In the process of China’s dynamic social changes over the past decades, the young-parent identity construction of an emerging middle class and the resulting changes of social-cultural values in this context have attracted the attention of academic research in recent years. With the focus on the discursive construction of parent identity, this study examines the utilization of first-person pronouns in three different interactional contexts, namely, parent-teacher interaction, parent-parent interaction, and parent-child interaction. The study further explores the patterns of alignment between the parents and their children, parents and teachers of their children, and peer parents during the process of identity construction, followed by a discussion of the implication that young, emerging middle-class Chinese parents fundamentally shape themselves as “concerned” and “involved” parents and the change of values between collectivity and agency. The study not only demonstrates the dynamic and pluralistic nature of parent identity but also deepens our understanding of the indexical roles of first-person pronouns in the discursive construction of emerging middle-class Chinese parent identity and its relationship with the recent social-cultural changes in the Chinese context.