This paper examines the relationship between armed conflict intensity and child labor using household level data from Iraq and taking advantage of a quasi-experimental setup. Armed conflict intensity is measured by the number of deaths related to conflict, and child labor is separated by type of work: economic and household. After controlling for individual and household characteristics that determine child labor, we find that armed conflict intensity is associated with a higher likelihood of entry into economic work sufficient to qualify as child labor, but is not associated with entry into household child labor. However, conflict intensity is associated with marginal increases in hours worked for both types of activity. We also explore gender differences. These results provide further evidence of the long-term costs of war on households.
George Sami Naufal, Michael Malcolm, Vidya Diwakar
In May-June 2020, Ummeed conducted a needs assessment with their partner community-based organisations across India by phone. It was to understand how parents and caregivers were coping with the COVID-19 pandemic, especially as it related to their ability to provide nurturing care for their children. The post Ummeed – Supporting caregiver mental health during the COVID-19 pandemic first appeared on Nurturing Care Framework for Early Childhood Development.
The Arab Network for Early Childhood, the International Rescue Committee, Save the Children, UNICEF, and the World Health Organization have released a new report "Advancing nurturing care in humanitarian settings: Overview of workshops in Arab countries" that shares learnings from a series of workshops held by partners in 2021 to advance commitment to early childhood development in the region, and highlights efforts by Iraq, Jordan, Palestine, and Syria to ensure nurturing care for children living in crisis settings. The early y The post Advancing nurturing care in humanitarian settings: Overview of workshops in Arab countries first appeared on Nurturing Care Framework for Early Childhood Development.
Ahlan Simsim is an early childhood development (ECD) initiative in the Middle East, launched by the International Rescue Committee (IRC) and Sesame Workshop in 2018. According to David Miliband, President and CEO of the IRC, it is the world's largest early childhood development program in a humanitarian setting. In December 2022 Ahlan Simsim passed a significant milestone: it has now reached more than one million children with direct services across Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria. The post Ahlan Simsim celebrates support for more than 1,000,000 children first appeared on Nurturing Care Framework for Early Childhood Development.
Nepal's Ministry of Health and Population, with support from WHO Country Office for Nepal, has introduced the WHO/UNICEF Care for Child Development course for the first time in the WHO South-East Asia Region. The post Nepal Introduces WHO/UNICEF Care for Child Development Course first appeared on Nurturing Care Framework for Early Childhood Development.
Coronaviruses (CoVs) are a large family of enveloped, single-stranded, zoonotic RNA viruses. Four CoVs commonly circulate among humans: HCoV2-229E, -HKU1, -NL63 and -OC43. However, CoVs can rapidly mutate and recombine leading to novel CoVs that can spread from animals to humans. The novel CoVs severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV) emerged in 2002 and Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) in 2012. The 2019 novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) is currently causing a severe outbreak of disease (termed COVID-19) in China and multiple other countries, threatening to cause a global pandemic. In humans, CoVs mostly cause respiratory and gastrointestinal symptoms. Clinical manifestations range from a common cold to more severe disease such as bronchitis, pneumonia, severe acute respiratory distress syndrome, multi-organ failure and even death. SARS-CoV, MERS-CoV and SARS-CoV-2 seem to less commonly affect children and to cause fewer symptoms and less severe disease in this age group compared with adults, and are associated with much lower case-fatality rates. Preliminary evidence suggests children are just as likely as adults to become infected with SARS-CoV-2 but are less likely to be symptomatic or develop severe symptoms. However, the importance of children in transmitting the virus remains uncertain. Children more often have gastrointestinal symptoms compared with adults. Most children with SARS-CoV present with fever, but this is not the case for the other novel CoVs. Many children affected by MERS-CoV are asymptomatic. The majority of children infected by novel CoVs have a documented household contact, often showing symptoms before them. In contrast, adults more often have a nosocomial exposure. In this review, we summarize epidemiologic, clinical and diagnostic findings, as well as treatment and prevention options for common circulating and novel CoVs infections in humans with a focus on infections in children.
BACKGROUND: Few epidemiological data on autism spectrum disorders (ASD) exist for Arabic countries. We conducted the first survey of ASD in Qatar, a population with high consanguinity level. METHODS: This cross-sectional survey was conducted from 2015 to 2018 in Qatar school-age children (N = 176,960) from national and immigrant families. Children diagnosed with ASD were identified through medical centers and special needs schools. Records were abstracted and supplemented by parental interviews. Additionally, children attending 93 schools were screened; ASD case status was confirmed in random samples of screen-positive and screen-negative children. Prevalence was estimated after taking into account different sampling fractions and participation rates at each survey phase. RESULTS: One thousand three hundred and ninety-three children already diagnosed with ASD were identified. Among 9,074 school survey participants, 760 screen-negative children and 163 screen-positive children were evaluated; 17 were confirmed to have ASD including five children newly diagnosed. Prevalence was 1.14% (95% CI: 0.89-1.46) among 6- to 11-year-olds. ASD was reported in full siblings/extended relatives in 5.9% (95% CI: 0.042-0.080)/11.8% (95% CI: 0.095-0.146) families. First-degree consanguinity in Qatari cases (45%) was comparable to known population levels. Among 844 ASD cases (mean age: 7.2 years; 81% male), most children experienced language delay (words: 75.1%; phrase speech: 91.4%), and 19.4% reported developmental regression. At the time of the survey, persisting deficits in expressive language (19.4%) and peer interactions (14.0%) were reported in conjunction with behavioral problems (ADHD: 30.2%; anxiety: 11.0%). In multivariate logistic regression, ASD severity was associated with parental consanguinity, gestational diabetes, delay in walking, and developmental regression. CONCLUSIONS: ASD prevalence in Qatar is consistent with recent international studies. The methods employed in this study should help designing comparable surveys in the region. We estimated that 187,000 youths under age 20 have ASD in Gulf countries. This figure should assist in planning health and educational services for a young, fast-growing population.
Fouad A. W. Alshaban, Mohammed Aldosari, Hawraa Al‐Shammari et al.
Abstract Parental involvement in dual-earner families is a subject that has been widely studied in the literature in Western contexts. Less attention, however, has been allocated to the challenges that dual-earner families encounter in raising children in Arab Gulf states. This paper study aims to address the following questions: To what extent are dual-earner families involved in their children’s lives? What are the gender differences in parental involvement? This paper employed the 2017 survey data of working Qatari males and females to measure their parental involvement and engagement in family time and childcare. The results highlighted parental factors, work characteristics and social supports as key factors determining the degree of parental involvement. The results also showed the gender differences in parental involvement scores, which comprise several factors, including work demands and time spent with children. Taken together, our findings provide insights allowing suggestions for mechanisms that could generate foundational parental welfare policies for dual-earner families in Qatar and the wider Arab Gulf Region as a whole. Further contributions to this research domain could include studies encompassing a wider scope of geographical locations within the Arab Gulf states using robust experimental investigations.
Abstract The importance of parents in the transmission of educational aspirations to children is well-established. However, little is known about the quality of parent-child communication about educational aspirations and how this communication relates to children’s educational aspirations in socioeconomically disadvantaged families in rural China. In this study, we sought to gain insight into parent-child communication around educational aspirations from the perspective of Chinese rural adolescents. Twenty-three grade-9 students were recruited from middle schools in Songzi, a poor rural county in central China. Participants comprised 12 boys and 11 girls aged 14 to 16 years ( M = 14.65 years, SD = 0.59). Students completed one-to-one qualitative interviews about parent-child communication and their educational aspirations in June 2020. Thematic analysis revealed that adolescents’ educational aspirations were strongly influenced by their parents’ beliefs and aspirations for them, with fulfilling parental aspirations and achieving economic success being important influences on rural adolescents’ educational aspirations. However, parent-child communication quality was undermined when parents had an authoritarian communication style and when parents were absent due to rural-urban migration, in which case adolescents reported stress and perceived lack of support in achieving their goals. In addition, mothers were viewed as playing a more vital role in communication than fathers. The implications of the findings for school and community-based interventions promoting rural parents’ ability to communicate effectively with their children about academic concerns are discussed.
Xiaodi Chen, Jennifer L. Allen, Eirini Flouri et al.
Abstract We examined how family and friendship connections of adolescents (15–19 years old) interrelate and how these interactions affect their self-perceived depression and stress. The data were collected through the Abu Dhabi Quality of Life Survey in 2018, which was completed by more than 51,000 respondents. Nine hundred and fifty-eight out of 3356 adolescents in the survey self-identified themselves as depressed. We developed a structural equation path model to explicate the relationships among the variables hypothesized to affect adolescents’ self-reported depression. The results produced an excellent fit of statistics of the model to the data. In general, social connections and relationships with family and friends directly affected adolescents’ self-perceived depressive feelings. More specifically, variables such as “often feeling isolated from people,” “the amount of quality time spent with family,” “the frequency of meeting with friends, relatives or colleagues,” and “involvement in informal activities with friends” had the greatest total effects on adolescents’ self-perceived depression. “The amount of quality time spent with family” also exerted indirect influence on feelings of isolation. Involvement in sports groups, involvement in religious and spiritual groups, and generalized trust did not exhibit any direct influence but had an indirect impact on self-perceived depression. The findings could contribute to the current understanding of theories of depression and yield implications for social policy, social service, and social work interventions for school-aged adolescents in Abu Dhabi.
Masood Abdulla Badri, Mugheer Al Khaili, Muna Albahar et al.
