Violence and Vulnerability: Children’s Strategies and the Logic of Violence in Burundi

Abstract Objectives This study aimed to understand the values held by elementary school children in constructing food choices and the strategies they used to influence their mothers’ food purchasing decisions. Methods Semi-structured qualitative interviews were conducted with 40 elementary school children (aged 6–11 years) and their mothers living in South Carolina. Food choice information was collected only from children and strategies to influence mothers’ food purchases were collected from both children and mothers. The interviews were audio-recorded, transcribed verbatim, and open-coded. Coding matrices were used to compare children's and mothers’ responses on the children's strategies to influence mothers’ food purchasing decisions. Results Children most valued taste, texture, and flavor of the food items, followed by perceived benefits, happiness, craving, following family and friends, the items’ healthfulness, preparation, and presentation when they made food choice decisions. Children reported 157 strategies that they used to influence mothers’ purchasing decisions. Mothers had concordance with 80 strategies that children mentioned. In mother-child dyads, more concordance was observed between mothers and sons than between mothers and daughters. The most common and successful strategies from both the children's and mothers’ perspectives were reasoned requests, repeated polite requests, and referencing friends. Other strategies included offers to contribute money or service, teaming up with siblings, writing a shopping list, and grabbing desired items. Mothers perceived that children had a lot of influence on their food purchasing decisions. Conclusions Children were aware of the strategies that would get positive reactions from their mothers. Mothers’ acknowledgement of children's influence on their food purchase decisions suggests that children can serve as change agents for improving mothers’ food purchases if children prefer healthy foods. Interventions are needed for mothers to help address children's strategies to influence mothers to purchase unhealthy foods and make healthy foods more appealing to children instead of yielding to children's requests for unhealthy items. Funding Sources SPARC grant and Ogoussan Doctoral Research Award from the University of South Carolina.

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Children making sense of economic insecurity: Facework, fairness and belonging

Journal of Sociology ◽

10.1177/1440783316630113 ◽

2016 ◽

Vol 53 (1) ◽

pp. 94-109 ◽

Cited By ~ 4

Author(s):

Rose Butler

Keyword(s):

Low Income ◽

Recent Analysis ◽

Economic Insecurity ◽

Cultural Narratives ◽

Making Sense ◽

Research With Children ◽

Low Income Families ◽

Complex Forms ◽

Regional Australia ◽

Children's Strategies

This article contributes to our understanding of how children cope with economic insecurity in affluent nations. Based on research with children and adults in regional Australia, it argues for the importance of cultural narratives in making sense of children’s strategies to cope with financial hardship. Drawing on Goffman’s concept of ‘facework’, and recent analysis by Pugh, it analyses the complex forms of facework that children use to manage situations of economic insecurity and shows how such practices may be anchored in cultural narratives of ‘fairness’. Goffman’s ‘facework’ refers to the expressive order required to save face, a term used to signify how we participate in a social regime, particularly when we perform unexpected feelings. In this article, the author develops a theoretical framework to analyse three types of facework used by children from low-income families in this Australian context, and coins these practices ‘going without’, ‘cutting down’, and ‘staying within’. Through such facework, children sought to maintain inclusion and uphold dignity, practices which were increasingly difficult amidst rising inequality. This raised contradictions in belonging and acceptance among others, particularly for children from refugee backgrounds.

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Children's Strategies for Gathering Information in Three Tasks

Child Development ◽

10.2307/1130421 ◽

1986 ◽

Vol 57 (6) ◽

pp. 1429 ◽

Cited By ~ 31

Author(s):

Patricia H. Miller ◽

Vernon F. Haynes ◽

Darlene DeMarie-Dreblow ◽

Janet Woody-Ramsey

Keyword(s):

Children's Strategies

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Keeping the Teacher Happy

The Aboriginal Child at School ◽

10.1017/s0310582200011111 ◽

1980 ◽

Vol 8 (4) ◽

pp. 3-7 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

M. Christie

Keyword(s):

The Other ◽

Children’S Behaviour ◽

Children's Strategies

In his book How Children Fail, John Holt talks about the strategies children have for coping with school. The strategies of most children, says Holt, have been consistently self-centred, protective and aimed above all else at avoiding trouble, embarrassment, punishment, disapproval or loss of status. This is particularly true of the ones who have had a tough time in school. When they get a problem, I can read the thoughts on their faces. I can almost hear them, ‘Am I going to get this right? Probably not. What’ll happen to me when I get it wrong? Will the teacher get mad? Will the other kids laugh at me?’I didn’t really get to thinking much about children’s strategies until I had stopped teaching and gone into a few classes to observe as a fly on the wall. Most of what went on in the classroom went completely unnoticed by the teacher. And what the teacher did notice, she seemed often to misunderstand. The children had an amazing variety of strategies which really had the teacher fooled. Some of them had fooled me too, for the years I had been teaching. I thought that if I were to point out some of the strategies which I saw, teachers may begin to look more carefully at their own and their children’s behaviour.

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Children's Strategies for Giving Voice to Needs Consistent with the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC)

Family Court Review ◽

10.1111/fcre.12517 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Jelena Zumbach ◽

Michael Saini ◽

Ute Koglin

Keyword(s):

Rights Of The Child ◽

Children's Strategies

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Children's Strategies for Displaying Anger and Sadness: What Works With Whom?

Merrill-Palmer Quarterly ◽

10.1353/mpq.2003.0006 ◽

2003 ◽

Vol 49 (1) ◽

pp. 100-122 ◽

Cited By ~ 50

Author(s):

Kimberly L. Shipman ◽

Janice Zeman ◽

April E. Nesin ◽

Monica Fitzgerald

Keyword(s):

What Works ◽

Children's Strategies

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Are mothers’ protective attachment strategies related to their children’s strategies?

Clinical Child Psychology and Psychiatry ◽

10.1177/1359104517704027 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 22 (3) ◽

pp. 358-377 ◽

Cited By ~ 5

Author(s):

Patricia M Crittenden ◽

Katrina Robson ◽

Alison Tooby ◽

Charles Fleming

Keyword(s):

Treatment Success ◽

Adult Attachment Interview ◽

Psychosocial Treatment ◽

School Age Children ◽

School Age ◽

Age Assessment ◽

Preschool Assessment ◽

Mother And Child ◽

Children's Strategies ◽

Attachment Strategies

Aims: We explored the relation between mothers’ protective attachment strategies and those of their school-age children. Methods: In total, 49 child–mother dyads participated in a short longitudinal study when the children were 5.5 and 6.0 years old. Their strategies were first assessed with the Preschool Assessment of Attachment (PAA) and then with the School-age Assessment of Attachment (SAA). Mothers were assessed with the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI). The Dynamic-Maturational Model of Attachment and Adaptation (DMM) was used to classify the assessments. Results: The validity and precision of the DMM-AAI were supported: Mothers’ AAI classifications were related to their referral group (normative or clinical) and measures of stress and distress. The DMM categories were more associated with risk than the Ainsworth categories. Types A, C and A/C were differentiated by trauma, triangulation and depression. Mothers’ and children’s protective attachment strategies were related, with B mothers having B children and A or C mothers having children using the same or opposite strategy. Children whose classification changed from the PAA to the SAA had mothers with complex traumas. Conclusion: When psychosocial treatment is needed, knowing whether mother and child use the same or different strategies and whether mothers have complex trauma can affect treatment success.

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Children's strategies when reporting appropriate and inappropriate speech events

Pragmatics ◽

10.1075/prag.1.1.03hic ◽

1991 ◽

Vol 1 (1) ◽

pp. 27-70 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Maya Hickmann ◽

David Warden

Keyword(s):

Information Exchange ◽

Background Knowledge ◽

Point Of View ◽

Developmental Changes ◽

Functional Value ◽

Speech Events ◽

Children's Strategies

This study examines the effects of utterance form and appropriateness on how children report conversations. Children between 7 and 9 years were asked to narrate filmed dialogues that contained two types of target utterances: (a) declaratives, interrogatives, or imperatives that were used appropriately as directives; (b) declaratives and interrogatives that were inappropriate from the point of view of information exchange, i.e., that should not have been used by the interlocutors as means of giving or requesting information, given background knowledge conditions. When reporting the appropriate directive targets, the 7/8-year-olds frequently transformed declaratives into more explicit imperatives, while the 9-year-olds' reports did not vary systematically with directive types. With respect to the inappropriate targets, omissions were more frequent at 7/8 years, transformations at 9 years. Transformations consisted most often of changing the mood or modality of inappropriate declaratives to make them appropriate. Some role reversals also occurred with inappropriate interrogatives. Finally, children of all ages omitted or transformed other events preceding or following the target utterances, so as to make the dialogues coherent more globally. These findings show children's sensitivity to the forms and functions of utterances in conversations, but they also suggest developmental changes in their reporting strategies. The younger children prefer functionally transparent reports and they omit utterances in cases of inadequate conditions of use. With increasing age, children use more complex strategies to adapt some inappropriate utterances locally by transforming systematically their form, their conditions of use, and/or their functional value.

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