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African American males are less likely to engage in mental health services. Racial discrimination, cultural mistrust, mental health disparities, and racial identity roles are significant factors impeding African American men from pursuing or continuing counseling. Unfortunately, counselors subliminally acknowledge the stereotypical labels ascribed to African American males lead to a poor or non-existing rapport, and tend to create solutions for the clients, disregarding their intrinsic motivation and autonomy. This conceptual article discussed racial discrimination, microaggression, and community ties as the barriers to counseling engagement among African American males. The article also highlighted the history of counseling African American males and the present urgency for a culturally sensitive model using the concepts of Motivational Interviewing for encouraging counseling engagement and autonomous resolution of ambivalence.

Toys are usually discussed in the social sciences in terms of their realistic or adaptive functions. Viewed as family bonding gifts, as tools of growth, as self‐moving machines, or as consumer objects, they contribute to the normative purposes of culture. The data of the present article demonstrate that these functional paradigms underestimate the extent to which toys are assimilated into and transformed by the child's own imaginative life. Evidence is presented from children's narrative accounts of their favorite play. In addition, this article attempts to deconstruct the paradoxical character of the way in which toy signifiers themselves contribute to the negation of everyday realism.

The study of play is traced through its historical roots and its contemporary disciplinary and sex-role contexts.

We stand at the threshold of an intrusion into social science by modes once known as literary or esthetic or ludic.

When a 10-year-old asks you what happens if you cross an elephant with peanut butter and then tells you that you get ajar of peanut butter that never forgets, or an elephant that sticks to the roof of your mouth, you laugh and pass on. Lighthearted trivialities of that sort are amusing but they are not very important. As long as the 10-year-old buries his head back into his arithmetic, all is well. But what you fear with that sort of nonsense is that, before you can turn around, everyone else is chattering away with the same sort of playfulness, and your lesson is lost. "How did the skeleton get pregnant?" "She made no bones about it!" There's no going on after that. Even when the child at play is quite earnest and preoccupied, as with his stamps or her jacks, there is still the feeling that it does not really matter. Of course, earnest play keeps them quiet and makes playground supervision somewhat easier, but that's your value, not theirs. Whatever value it has to them is not very important to you. It is customary to say that our negative attitude to children's play is due to the great importance that the work ethic has assumed in the development of Western civilization. The work ethic is the view that man justifies and redeems himself through productive work. While this may be true, it is also true that most

In the general population teenage pregnancies present an elevated rate of perinatal mortality compared with pregnancies of women in their twenties. In two large-scale university hospital studies (one American, one Danish), the teenage pregnancies showed lower perinatal mortality than those of any other age group. This article attempts to determine the origin of these differing results. A comparative analysis was conducted focusing on methodologies, subject characteristics, and treatment procedures involved in the two classes of studies, which involved representative populations and university hospital samples. The uniformly high quality medical treatment provided to all subjects in the university hospital samples contrasted with the uneven quality of treatment found in population studies constituted the most important difference. Since pregnant teenagers generally tend to be of lower socioeconomic status, they are likely to receive inferior medical care. It was argued that this factor could, to large extent, be responsible for the elevated mortality rates found in teenage pregnancies in representative populations.

An examination of some of the issues in the interaction between contextual and textual determinants of children's stories is presented here.

Children often act as caretakers responsible for other children. Such child caretaking varies widely in its frequency, as well as in the degree of institutionalization, relationship to parental caretaking, degree of indulgence, and incidence at differing ages. Residence and household patterns, size of the family, and the subsistence economy, daily routines, and work load of the family are important in determining availability of child caretakers in the home. The United States appears to have fewer alternative caretakers available, and less child caretaking, than most societies. Child caretaking is related to a number of developmental areas during childhood; eight are suggestedin this review: (1) mother-child relationships and attachment; (2) conceptions and emergence of childhood stages; (3) formation and organization of play groups; (4) development of social responsibility; (5) sex differences; (6) development of individual diferences; (7) development of cognitive-style differences; and (8) motivation an...

This paper outlines the character of girls’ play as it proceeds from infancy to adolescence. It shows that although there has been considerable historical change in girls’ play and games, there has also been considerable persistence f older stereotypical forms. The position is taken that w atever the causes of these changes and these persistences, and whatever their outcome, there is merit in attempting to understand more fully their present, if passing, nature. The whole of this chapter, therefore, is an exercise in what we have called elsewhere the typological error, which says that females must always be stereotypically feminine and males must always be stereotypically masculine (Rosenberg and Sutton-Smith, 1972). Clearly this need not be so and much of the time is not so. However, when one deals with “girls at play,” it is almost impossible to escape the cultural burden of this prepotent dichotomy.

A person's experience of particular sibling associations might have a lasting effect upon his involvement in adult roles. This chapter reviews the evidence from several investigations dealing with the effects of ordinal position and sibling sex status on role involvement. The studies indicate that the effects of ordinal position and sibling sex status vary with age and with the nature of the variables being considered. Sex of sibling has stronger effects on adjustment, anxiety and interest inventories, and ordinal position has stronger effects upon mental abilities—with boys affecting girls more than vice versa, and first-borns affecting non-first-borns more than vice versa. In explaining the effects of different ordinal positions and sibling sex status on masculine-feminine role differences, the view has been taken that these positions and statuses are arbitrary phenomena, so that if systematic relationships are found, the problem is to locate the different types of learning experience involved.

The present study proposed that empathy as postural inference may characterize second-borns, while empathy defined as verbal understanding of the role of another may be more characteristic of first-borns. The former is likened to Miller and Dollard's “matched-dependent” behavior, the latter follows the principle of “copying.” Results with males tend to confirm the superiority of the verbal-understanding type of empathy in first-born males, while second-born males are superior on empathy measures which rely on postural cues. Results for females suggest that superiority on postural inference is affected by the presence of a brother, not ordinal position, while superiority on empathy as verbal understanding is an accompaniment of having a sister.

A series of studies on :he relationship between children's responses to play inventories and their acruzl free play behavior was planned in collaboration with Vaughn J. Crandall of Fels Research Institute, 0hio.Vrior to the death of Dr. Crandall two initial studies were made at the Fels Day Camp during the summers of 1962 and 1963. Each study involved 50 elementary school age children equally divided as to sex and distributed throughout Grades 1 to 6. The play inventory items were derived from a list which had been shown to have discriminating power in a series of earlier studies (3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 11). The children were rated for their competence and participation in masculine and feminine free-play activities. There were problems in establishing an adequately high degree of reliability for some of these ratings. Ratings were also available for other dimensions of free-play behavior (including dependency, aggression, passivity, and achievement) which had been used in Dr. Crandall's large scale studies of children's achievement behaviors ( 1 ) . In the first study involving a play scale composed mainly of formal games and mature items (2), there were consistent relations berween girls' play preferences and their free. play participation and competence. For boys there was no such general relationship between scale responses and free-play behavior. However, sex inappropriate responses did correlate with dependency behavior toward adults, a finding consistent with those of earlier studies (5, 9). In the second study a more inclusive play scale was employed, involving many informal plays as well as games, and many more immarure items (7). In addition, masculine and feminine responses were scored separately rather than combined in one score as in the first study. The results indicated what appeared to be a response set operating for both boys and girls; those who tended to make many responses to the masculine scale also tended to make many responses to the feminine scale. In general, the correlates suggested that high responding girls tended to be more intelligent and more masculine in their free-play behaviors, and the high responding boys tended to be younger and more feminine in their free-play behaviors. The tentative conclusion from these two preliminary studies was that systematic, if not direct, relztionships exist between certain types of play preference and play behaviors and that play scales may be a potential diagnostic device 'A full report of these preliminary studies including tables is available from the American Documentation Institute, Auxiliary Publications Project, Photoduplication Service, Library of Congress, Washington 25, D. C. Remit $2.50 for photocopies or $1.75 for 35-mm. microfilm of Document No. 8111. This research was aided by a grant from U. S. P. H., MH-2238.

Games are systemic culture patterns which are distinctive, ancient, and widespread among the cultures of the world. While games and gamesters have long claimed the scholarly interest of anthropologists and psychologists, no general consideration of the phenomenon of involvement in games has yet been given from both cross-cultural and intra-cultural points of view. The evidence presented herein shows that variations in the distributions of games among cultures throughout the world, and in the game playing of American children and adults, are related to variations in child training. It is held that these relationships can be viewed in terms of psychological conflicts which lead people to become involved in games and other models. In the main, this discussion is limited to game involvement, but it must be recognized that there are other important aspects to game playing. Additional features will be treated in subsequent reports. In an earlier publication (Roberts, Arth, and Bush 1959: 597), games were defined as recreational activities characterized by organized play, competition, two or more sides, criteria for determining the winner, and agreed-upon rules. Many of the activities described as "games" in the ethnographic literature, however, do not satisfy the above requirements. Instead they are amusements: group pastimes such as the ritual game of dialogue, "Mother, Mother, the Pot Boils Over"; stunts such as diving and juggling; model play as with dolls, pets, and toy trains; and various other noncompetitive recreational activities. Although this article is focused on games, there is evidence that child-training variables are systematically related to classes of amusements as well.