Academic literature on the topic 'Child care-popular works'

Bereavement programs for children and parents are becoming popular since there are more and more neonatal intensive care programs, pediatric oncology programs and pediatric intensive care programs offering these services. This paper addresses the following question: Do bereavement programs work? An overview of the literature dating back to 1964 was undertaken. Only papers dealing with treatment were reviewed. Randomized controlled trials were selected as presenting the best evidence for or against program effectiveness. Methodologic features such as description of the sample, comparability of treatment and control groups, description of the intervention, use of objective, valid, reproducible and blinded outcome measures, sample size calculations, thoroughness of follow-up and attention to clinical as well as statistical significance were assessed. Four randomized controlled trials were found in the literature search. Two of the studies showed benefit, two did not. All four suffered significant methodologic flaws. At this time it is unclear as to whether or not bereavement programs help families. Given the high costs of health care, it is important that studies be done to determine which families are likely to benefit from bereavement programs and what type of program is effective.

Healthcare jobs are very popular among women, however in Japan, women readily quit working because of gender-role responsibilities. This study aimed to develop a workplace support checklist for women to continue to work. In 2017, we investigated 780 (female 74.8%) faculty members and healthcare professionals of one medical university in Japan. We asked them to score the extent to which they considered 35 items identified by a task team, to be related to continuous work support for female workers in healthcare. We carried out an exploratory factor analysis and extracted four domains with 16 items in all: “Support for child rearing and home care” (five items), “Information dissemination” (five items), “Active promotion of women workers to higher positions” (three items), and “Consulting and counseling service” (three items), with Cronbach’s alpha values ranging from 0.88 to 0.92. We found that the first three factors were generally associated with reasonably relevant characteristics of being female, in their 30s, married, and members of faculty. We also found that women with “Intention to leave” the workplace underscored the importance of “Support for child rearing and home care” and “Consulting and counseling service”. These results suggest that the checklist is reliable and valid.

The cognitive specificity of social pedagogy is its interest in the issues related to social conditionings of human development and, respectively, the specific social conditionings of the upbringing process. The notion has been developed in various directions since the very beginning of the discipline, yet the most clearly visible area seems to be the functioning of individuals, families and broader environment. Simultaneously, it is possible to observe that the issues have been entangled in certain socio-political conditions, the knowledge of which is substantial for the reconstruction and identification of the research heritage of social pedagogy. All these interrelationships allowed to distinguish particular stages of development of social pedagogy. Contemporarily, it is a discipline with descent scientific achievements which marks out and indicates new perspectives both in the field of educational practice and the theory of social activity. Social pedagogy, similarly to other areas (subdisciplines) of pedagogy, deals with the notion of upbringing in a certain aspect – in a certain problem inclination. It specializes in social and environmental conditionings of the upbringing process. It is the thread of the social context of upbringing what proves to be the crucial, basic and fundamental determinant of upbringing and, thus, decisive factor for human development. This notion was always present in the general pedagogical thought however, its organized and rationalized character surfaced only when the social pedagogy was distinguished as a separate, systematic area of pedagogy. It occurred in Poland only at the beginning of the 19th century. From the very beginning the creators and precursors of this subdiscipline pointed out its relatively wide range. It has been the notion of individual – social conditionings of human development, yet, social pedagogists were interested in human at every stage of their lives i.e. childhood, adolescence, adulthood and old age. Another area of interest were the issues related to family as the most important “place” of human development and, in this respect, the issues connected with institutions undertaking various activities: help, care, support and animation. Finally, the scope of interest included issues related to the environment as the place where the upbringing process is supposed to realize and realizes. Since the very beginning of social pedagogy these have been the prominent threads for exploration. At the same time it ought to be stated that these threads have always been interwoven with various social-political conditions both with regards to their interpretation as well as possible and planned educational practice. Therefore social pedagogy and its findings must be always “read” in the context of social-political conditions which accompanied the creation of a given thought or realization of some educational practice. As these conditions have constantly been undergoing certain transformations one may clearly distinguish particular stages of development of social pedagogy. The stages reflect various approaches to exploring and describing the above-mentioned areas of this discipline. Following the assumptions regarding the chronology of social pedagogy development and the three distinguished stages of development, it seems worthwhile to study how the issues related to an individual, family and environment were shaped at these stages. The first stage when the social psychology was arising was mainly the time of Helena Radlińska’s activities as well as less popular and already forgotten Polish pedagogists – precursors of this discipline such as: Anna Chmielewska, Irena Jurgielewiczowa, Zofia Gulińska or Maria Korytowska. In that period social pedagogists mainly dealt with individuals, families and the functioning of environments in the context of educational activities aimed at arousing national identity and consciousness. However, their work did no focus on indicating the layers of threats and deficits in functioning of individuals, social groups or families but on the possibilities to stimulate their development and cultural life. Therefore social pedagogy of those times was not as strongly related to social work as it currently is but dealt mainly with educational work. The classic example of such approach in the research carried out in the social pedagogy of that time may be the early works by Helena Radlińska who undertook the narrow field of cultural-educational work targeted to all categories of people. The works described such issues as the organization of libraries, organizing extra-school education (H. Orsza, 1922, H. Orsza-Radlińska, 1925). It ought to be stated that this kind of work was regarded as public and educational work, whereas currently it exists under the name of social work. Frequently quoted works related to the issues of arising social pedagogy were also the works by Eustachy Nowicki e.g. “Extra-school education and its social-educational role in the contemporary Polish life” from 1923 or the works by Stefania Sempołowska, Jerzy Grodecki or Jadwiga Dziubińska. Such an approach and tendencies are clearly visible in a book from 1913 (a book which has been regarded by some pedagogists as the first synthetic presentation of social pedagogy). It is a group work entitled “Educational work – its tasks, methods and organization” (T. Bobrowski, Z. Daszyńska-Golińska, J. Dziubińska, Z. Gargasa, M. Heilperna, Z. Kruszewska, L. Krzywicki, M. Orsetti, H. Orsza, St. Posner, M. Stępkowski, T. Szydłowski, Wł. Weychert-Szymanowska, 1913). The problem of indicated and undertaken research areas and hence, the topics of works realized by the social pedagogists of that times changed immediately after regaining independence and before World War II. It was the time when the area of social pedagogists interests started to include the issues of social inequality, poverty and, subsequently, the possibility of helping (with regards to the practical character of social pedagogy). The research works undertaken by social pedagogists were clearly of diagnostic, practical and praxeological character. They were aimed at seeking the causes of these phenomena with simultaneous identification and exploration of certain environmental factors as their sources. A classic example of such a paper – created before the war – under the editorial management of H. Radlińska was the work entitled “Social causes of school successes and failures” from 1937 (H. Radlińska, 1937). Well known are also the pre-war works written by the students of H. Radlińska which revealed diagnostic character such as: “The harm of a child” by Maria Korytowska (1937) or “A child of Polish countryside” edited by M. Librachowa and published in Warsaw in 1934 (M. Librachowa, 1934). Worthwhile are also the works by Czesław Wroczyński from 1935 entitled “Care of an unmarried mother and struggle against abandoning infants in Warsaw” or the research papers by E. Hryniewicz, J. Ryngmanowa and J. Czarnecka which touched upon the problem of neglected urban and rural families and the situation of an urban and rural child – frequently an orphaned child. As it may be inferred, the issues of poverty, inefficient families, single-parent families remain current and valid also after the World War II. These phenomena where nothing but an outcome of various war events and became the main point of interest for researchers. Example works created in the circle of social pedagogists and dealing with these issues may be two books written in the closest scientific environment of Helena Radlińska – with her immense editorial impact. They are “Orphanage – scope and compensation” (H. Radlińska, J. Wojtyniak, 1964) and “Foster families in Łódź” (A. Majewska, 1948), both published immediately after the war. Following the chronological approach I adopted, the next years mark the beginning of a relative stagnation in the research undertaken in the field of social pedagogy. Especially the 50’s – the years of notably strong political indoctrination and the Marxist ideological offensive which involved building the so called socialist educational society – by definition free from socio-educational problems in public life. The creation and conduction of research in this period was also hindered due to organizational and institutional reasons. The effect of the mentioned policy was also the liquidation of the majority of social sciences including research facilities – institutes, departments and units. An interesting and characteristic description of the situation may be the statement given by Professor J. Auletner who described the period from the perspective of development of social policy and said that: “During the Stalinist years scientific cultivation of social policy was factually forbidden”. During the period of real socialism it becomes truly difficult to explore the science of social policy. The name became mainly the synonym of the current activity of the state and a manifestation of struggles aimed at maintaining the existing status quo. The state authorities clearly wanted to subdue the science of social activities of the state […]. During the real socialism neither the freedom for scientific criticism of the reality nor the freedom of research in the field of social sciences existed. It was impossible (yet deliberated) to carry out a review of poverty and other drastic social issues” (J. Auletner, 2000). The situation changes at the beginning of the 60’s (which marks the second stage of development of social pedagogy) when certain socio-political transformations – on the one hand abandoning the limitation of the Stalinist period (1953 – the death of Stalin and political thaw), on the other – reinforcement of the idea of socialist education in social sciences lead to resuming environmental research. It was simultaneously the period of revival of Polish social pedagogy with regards to its institutional dimension as well as its ideological self-determination (M. Cichosz, 2006, 2014). The issues of individuals, families and environments was at that time explored with regards to the functioning of educational environments and in the context of exploring the environmental conditionings of the upbringing process. Typical examples here may be the research by Helena Izdebska entitled “The functioning of a family and childcare tasks” (H. Izdebska, 1967) and “The causes of conflicts in a family” (H. Izdebska, 1975) or research conducted by Anna Przecławska on adolescents and their participation in culture: “Book, youth and cultural transformations” (A. Przecławska, 1967) or e.g. “Cultural diversity of adolescents against upbringing problems” (A. Przecławska, 1976). A very frequent notion undertaken at that time and remaining within the scope of the indicated areas were the issues connected with organization and use of free time. This may be observed through research by T. Wujek: “Homework and active leisure of a student” (T. Wujek, 1969). Another frequently explored area was the problem of looking after children mainly in the papers by Albin Kelm or Marian Balcerek. It is worthwhile that the research on individuals, families or environments were carried out as part of the current pedagogical concepts of that time like: parallel education, permanent education, lifelong learning or the education of adults, whereas, the places indicated as the areas of human social functioning in which the environmental education took place were: family, school, housing estate, workplace, social associations. It may be inferred that from a certain (ideological) perspective at that time we witnessed a kind of modeling of social reality as, on the one hand particular areas were diagnosed, on the other – a desired (expected) model was built (designed) (with respect to the pragmatic function of practical pedagogy). A group work entitled “Upbringing and environment” edited by B. Passini and T. Pilch (B. Passini, T. Pilch, 1979) published in 1979 was a perfect illustration of these research areas. It ought to be stated that in those years a certain model of social diagnosis proper for undertaken social-pedagogical research was reinforced (M. Deptuła, 2005). Example paper could be the work by I. Lepalczyk and J. Badura entitled: “Elements of pedagogical diagnostics” (I. Lepalczyk, J. Badura, 1987). Finally, the social turning point in the 80’s and 90’s brought new approaches to the research on individuals, families and environments which may be considered as the beginning of the third stage of the development of social pedagogy. Breaking off the idea of socialist education meant abandoning the specific approach to research on the educational environment previously carried out within a holistic system of socio-educational influences (A. Przecławska, w. Theiss, 1995). The issues which dominated in the 90’s and still dominate in social pedagogy with regards to the functioning of individuals, families and local environments have been the issues connected with social welfare and security as well as education of adults. Research papers related to such approach may be the work by Józefa Brągiel: “Upbringing in a single-parent family” from 1990; the work edited by Zofia Brańka “The subjects of care and upbringing” from 2002 or a previous paper written in 1998 by the same author in collaboration with Mirosław Szymański “Aggression and violence in modern world” published in 1999 as well as the work by Danuta Marzec “Childcare at the time of social transformations” from 1999 or numerous works by St. Kawula, A. Janke. Also a growing interest in social welfare and social work is visible in the papers by J. Brągiel and P. Sikora “Social work, multiplicity of perspectives, family – multiculturalism – education” from 2004, E. Kanwicz and A. Olubiński: “Social activity in social welfare at the threshold of 21st century” from 2004 or numerous works on this topic created by the circles gathered around the Social Pedagogy Faculty in Łódź under the management of E. Marynowicz-Hetka. Current researchers also undertake the issues related to childhood (B. Smolińska-Theiss, 2014, B. Matyjas, 2014) and the conditionings of the lives of seniors (A. Baranowska, E. Kościńska, 2013). Ultimately, among the presented, yet not exclusive, research areas related to particular activities undertaken in human life environment (individuals, families) and fulfilled within the field of caregiving, social welfare, adult education, socio-cultural animation or health education one may distinguish the following notions:  the functioning of extra-school education institutions, most frequently caregiving or providing help such as: orphanage, residential home, dormitory, community centre but also facilities aimed at animating culture like youth cultural centres, cultural centres, clubs etc.,  the functioning of school, the realization of its functions (especially educational care), fulfilling and conditioning roles of student/teacher, the functioning of peer groups, collaboration with other institutions,  the functioning (social conditionings) of family including various forms of families e.g. full families, single-parent families, separated families, families at risk (unemployment) and their functioning in the context of other institutions e.g. school,  social pathologies, the issues of violence and aggression, youth subcultures,  participation in culture, leisure time, the role of media,  the functioning of the seniors – animation of activities in this field,  various dimensions of social welfare, support, providing help, the conditionings of functioning of such jobs as the social welfare worker, culture animator, voluntary work. It might be concluded that the issues connected with individuals, families and environment have been the centre of interest of social pedagogy since the very beginning of this discipline. These were the planes on which social pedagogists most often identified and described social life – from the perspective of human participation. On the course of describing the lives of individuals, families and broader educational environments social pedagogists figured out and elaborated on particular methods and ways of diagnosing social life. Is it possible to determine any regularities or tendencies in this respect? Unquestionably, at the initial stage of existence of this discipline, aimed at stimulating national consciousness and subsequent popularization of cultural achievements through certain activities – social and educational work, social pedagogists built certain models of these undertakings which were focused on stimulating particular social activity and conscious participation in social life. The issues concerning social diagnosis, though not as significant as during other stages, served these purposes and hence were, to a certain extent, ideologically engaged. The situation changed significantly before and shortly after the World War II. Facing particular conditions of social life – increase in many unfavourable phenomena, social pedagogists attempted to diagnose and describe them. It seems to have been the period of clear shaping and consolidation of the accepted model of empirical research in this respect. The model was widely accepted as dominating and has been developed in Polish social pedagogy during the second and subsequent stages of developing of this discipline. Practical and praxeological character of social pedagogy became the main direction of this development. Consequently, social diagnosis realized and undertaken with regard to social pedagogy was associated with the idea of a holistic system of education and extra-school educational influences and related educational environments. Therefore, the more and more clearly emphasized goal of environmental research – forecasting, was associated with the idea of building holistic, uniform educational impacts. After the systemic transformation which occurred in Poland in the 90’s, i.e. the third stage of social pedagogy development, abandoning the previous ideological solutions, environmental research including diagnosis was reassociated with social life problems mainly regarding social welfare and security. Individuals, families and environment have been and still seem to be the subject of research in the field of social pedagogy in Poland. These research areas are structurally bound with its acquired paradigm – of a science describing transformations of social life and formulating a directive of practical conduct regarding these transformations. A question arouses about the development of social pedagogy as the one which charts the direction of transformations of practices within the undertaken research areas. If it may be considered as such, then it would be worthwhile to enquire about the directions of the accepted theoretical acknowledgments. On the one hand we may observe a relatively long tradition of specifically elaborated and developed concepts, on the other – there are still new challenges ahead. Observing the previous and current development of Polish social pedagogy it may be inferred that its achievements are not overextensive with regards to the described and acquired theoretical deliberations. Nevertheless, from the very beginning, it has generated certain, specific theoretical solutions attempting to describe and explain particular areas of social reality. Especially noteworthy is the first period of the existence of this discipline, the period of such social pedagogists like i.a. J.W. Dawid, A. Szycówna, I. Moszczeńska or Helena Radlińska. The variety of the reflections with typically philosophical background undertaken in their works (e.g. E. Abramowski) is stunning. Equally involving is the second stage of development of social pedagogy i.e. shortly after the World War II, when Polish social pedagogy did not fully break with the heritage of previous philosophical reflections (A. Kamiński, R. Wroczyński) yet was developed in the Marxist current. A question arouses whether the area of education and the projects of its functioning of that time were also specific with regards to theory (it seems to be the problem of the whole Socialist pedagogy realised in Poland at that time). The following years of development of this discipline, especially at the turn of 80’s and 90’s was the period of various social ideas existing in social pedagogy – the influences of various concepts and theories in this field. The extent to which they were creatively adapted and included in the current of specific interpretations still requires detailed analysis, yet remains clearly visible. Another important area is the field of confronting the theories with the existing and undertaken solutions in the world pedagogy. A. Radziewicz-Winnicki refers to the views of the representatives of European and world social thought: P. Bourdieu, U. Beck, J. Baudrillard, Z. Bauman and M. Foucault, and tries to identify possible connections and relationships between these ideas and social pedagogy: “the ideas undertaken by the mentioned sociologists undoubtedly account for a significant source of inspiration for practical reflection within social pedagogy. Therefore, it is worthwhile to suggest certain propositions of their application in the field of the mentioned subdiscipline of pedagogy” (Radziewicz-Winnicki 2008). The contemporary social pedagogy in Poland constantly faces numerous challenges. W. Theiss analysed the contemporary social pedagogy with regards to its deficiencies but also the challenges imposed by globalisation and wrote: “Modern social pedagogy focuses mainly on the narrow empirical research and narrow practical activity and neglects research in the field of theory functioning separately from the realms of the global (or globalising) world or pays insufficient attention to these problems. It leads to a certain self-marginalisation of our discipline which leaves us beyond the current of main socio-educational problems of modern times. In this respect, it seems worthwhile and necessary to carry out intensive conceptual and research work focused on e.g. the following issues:  metatheory of social pedagogy and its relationship with modern trends in social sciences;  the concepts of human and the world, the concepts of the hierarchy of values;  the theory of upbringing, the theory of socialization, the theory of educational environment;  a conceptual key of the modern reality; new terms and new meanings of classical concepts;  socio-educational activities with direct and indirect macro range e.g. balanced development and its programmes, global school, intercultural education, inclusive education, professional education of emigrants”. Considering the currently undertaken research in this field and the accepted theoretical perspectives it is possible to indicate specific and elaborated concepts. They fluctuate around structural spheres of social pedagogy on the axis: human – environment – environmental transformations. It accounts for an ontological sphere of the acknowledged concepts and theories. Below, I am enumerating the concepts which are most commonly discussed in social pedagogy with regards to the acquired and accepted model. Currently discussed theoretical perspectives (contexts) in social pedagogy and the concepts within. I. The context of social personal relationships  social participation, social presence;  social communication, interaction;  reciprocity. II. The context of social activities (the organization of environment)  institutionalisation;  modernization;  urbanization. III. The context of environment  space;  place;  locality. The socially conditioned process of human development is a process which constantly undergoes transformations. The pedagogical description of this process ought to include these transformations also at the stage of formulating directives of practical activities – the educational practice. It is a big challenge for social pedagogy to simultaneously do not undergo limitations imposed by current social policy and response to real social needs. It has been and remains a very important task for social pedagogy.

A review of Druin, Allison. “What Children Can Teach Us: Developing Digital Libraries for Children with Children.” The Library Quarterly 75.1 (January 2005): 20-41. Objective – Through use of an interdisciplinary research team that included children, the study aimed to demonstrate that including children in the design of a digital library for children would result in some new approaches that would improve the site’s usability for the target user group. Design – Case study. Setting – The research was conducted at University of Maryland over a four-year period and involved an interdisciplinary research team of adult researchers from information studies, computer science, education, art, and psychology as well as seven children aged 7-11. Subjects – Seven children participated in the design team over two years; 153 children were observed and interviewed in the design phase; and the resulting new approaches were validated post-launch by analysis of International Children’s Digital Library (ICDL) (http://www.icdlbooks.org) users and usage patterns from November 2002-November 2003 (over 90,000 unique users and 19,000 optional questionnaire respondents). Method – The study included seven children in the design team for a digital library of international children’s books, which resulted in new approaches to collection development, cataloguing, and the search interface. In the design phase, research methods involving the seven children included brainstorming techniques, “cooperative inquiry”, low-tech prototyping; and lab use studies. The team also undertook observation and interviews of 153 children engaged in searching and selecting books from public library catalogues. In validating the new approaches that resulted from the design research, the team employed web log analysis, a voluntary online survey, and working with children in local schools to understand their use of ICDL. Main results – The inclusion of children’s viewpoints in the design stage of the ICDL had an impact in three areas: collection development, metadata, and interface design. For collection development, the research showed that kids were interested in books about children from other cultures and other times in history; in animals, both real and make-believe; in books that are sensitive to other cultures; and in books that are in good condition. For metadata, the research showed that children do not distinguish ‘fiction’ and ‘non-fiction’; look for ‘scary stuff’ or ‘gross stuff’; are often seeking books that make them feel a certain way; care about the look of book covers and may recall books by jacket colours; and use free vocabulary like ‘princesses’ and ‘jokes’. For interface design, the children’s involvement led to more search options (utilizing the new categories of metadata that were created), and customization options such as ability to choose different forms and colour palettes for book readers (e.g. the comic book reader, the spiral book reader). Web log and survey data, as well as lab tests, showed that the innovations resulting from the children’s design input were used. Of the over 90,000 unique users who visited the site in its first year, “genre” and “color” were statistically the fourth and fifth most popular search categories. In lab tests, girls used “color” twice as often as boys, and older boys preferred “genre” while younger children did not pay attention to that category. Conclusions – A first conclusion is that children’s input is vital to creating an online library that meets children’s information needs, tendencies and preferences. Also, seven design principles emerged: 1. Children’s input is invaluable and they should be involved in the design of their libraries. 2. Digital collections for children should consider works both contemporary and historical, and in different languages and representative of different cultures. 3. A variety of search interfaces are needed and it is particularly important to express categories with visual icons. 4. Additional metadata can be needed to reflect children’s views of relevant search criteria. 5. Interfaces should be customizable, such as providing various formats of reader that could themselves be customized in colour. 6. Tools should be suitable for use from the home and for collaborative use, such as use by a parent with a child. 7. Innovation requiring high bandwidth must be balanced with a low bandwidth version to assure broadest possible use. Lastly, the researchers concluded that more research is merited to assess the broader impact of digital libraries on children as searchers and readers.

It is known that from the very beginning of pregnancy, many women notice changes in general health state which form the clinical manifestations of asthenic symptom-complex, that allows to assess these disorders as a «psychosomatic reaction to pregnancy». According to different authors, their frequency varies from 13.7 to 33.3%, their influence on the development of gestational complications has been revealed and proved, and the conducted test analysis demonstrates donozological changes in mental health in 73% of healthy pregnant women. The investigations that allow predicting the success of motherhood are very important, and it justifies the purpose of this scientific research. The objective: was to determine the structure and frequency of the types of psychological component of gestation dominant, affecting reproductive loss and complicated pregnancy rates in women at high obstetric and perinatal risk. Materials and methods. Experimental psycho-diagnostic research was conducted on the basis of the Centre of Conscious Parenthood «Diviia»» on a voluntary basis with women at different stages of pregnancy. The data of 840 patients, who had prenatal training in the Centre, were analysed and the types of psychological component of gestational dominant (PCGD) were determined using the clinical and psychological method of I.V. Dobriakov «Pregnant woman attitude test» with the following type definition of PCGD: optimal, hypogestognostic, euphoric, anxious, depressive. In parallel, with the aim of clarifying and obtaining more reliable data, psychodiagnostic «Dating Questionnaire» and projective drawing method «Me and My Child» by Filippova G.G. were carried out. Interpretation of the results was based on the features of the drawing, which allowed including self-perception of pregnancy and the unborn baby to a particular type. In the absence of the exact statements characterizing certain features of the PCGD, the combined variants (optimally anxious, optimally hypogestognostic) and mixed types were determined. Optimal type was generally considered a favourable one for the course of pregnancy (including optimally anxious, optimally hypogestognostic) and mixed types, while pure anxious, depressive, euphoric and hypogestognostic types were unfavourable. The statistical analysis was performed using the Stata 12 license pack with the odds ratio (OR) and 95% confidence interval for assessing the influence of factor features on the pathological course of pregnancy. Results. According to the results, the most popular type of PCGD was the optimal type (60.47%), it correlated with the most favourable course of pregnancy and childbirth. 352 patients (41.90%) belonged to unfavourable pure types of PCGD. The most substantial proportion among the unfavourable types of gestation dominant was the anxious type (58.81%), the hypogestognostic type was noted in 21.87%. In patients who had placental dysfunction and its complications during pregnancy, the prevalence of unfavourable types of PCGD that accompanied the entire gestational period was characteristic. The preponderance of pure anxious type (52.65%) and mixed types (47.34%) was noted. The depressive and euphoric type was mostly noted only in the mixed variant in approximately the same proportions – 9.09% and 10.23% of the observations, respectively. The evaluation of the nature of the course of pregnancy and childbirth in patients, considering the favourable or unfavourable type of gestation dominant, allowed to establish differences in the preterm birth frequency, resistance to treatment of preeclampsia and the proportion of abnormalities in labour and its drug correction. The pathological course of pregnancy and childbirth in women with unfavourable type of PCGD was 2.8 times more frequent, the percentage of operational delivery was 3.5 times higher than in patients with a favourable type of PCGD; gestoses of different severity – 2.6 times more often were diagnosed in patients with unfavourable types of PCGD. Placental dysfunction with objectified criteria for utero-placental blood flow disorders was 2.0 times more frequent, and in one third of cases, it was accompanied by negative effects on the fetus, in particular FFS and fetal distress during pregnancy. Conclusions. The evaluation of the structure of the types of the psychological component of the gestation dominant showed a high percentage of unfavourable types of PCGD (41.90%), as well as a statistically significant relationship between the peculiarities of the course of pregnancy and the births that have a close connection with the placental disorder, the gestational complications that accompany it (preeclampsia and fetal distress) and the progression of the disadaptation of utero-placental circulation. In the case of anxious type of PCGD diagnosis, the risk and progression of placental dysfunction increases by 7.27 times (OR – 7.27; 4.66–11.35) and requires psychological help at the preconception stage. The obtained results indicate the adequacy of the reserves to reduce the number of negative perinatal outcomes, including not only a precise assessment of obstetric and somatic anamnesis, and a comprehensive clinical and laboratory examination that allows to form high-risk groups, differentiate the psychological assistance to women and perform preventive measures and therapeutic care even at the stage of pregnancy planning. Key words: psychological component of gestation dominant, pregnancy, preeclampsia, placental dysfunction, prognosis.

Introduction Food has always been an essential component of daily life. Today, thinking about food is a much more complicated pursuit than planning the next meal, with food studies scholars devoting their efforts to researching “anything pertaining to food and eating, from how food is grown to when and how it is eaten, to who eats it and with whom, and the nutritional quality” (Duran and MacDonald 234). This is in addition to the work undertaken by an increasingly wide variety of popular culture researchers who explore all aspects of food (Risson and Brien 3): including food advertising, food packaging, food on television, and food in popular fiction. In creating stories, from those works that quickly disappear from bookstore shelves to those that become entrenched in the literary canon, writers use food to communicate the everyday and to explore a vast range of ideas from cultural background to social standing, and also use food to provide perspectives “into the cultural and historical uniqueness of a given social group” (Piatti-Farnell 80). For example in Oliver Twist (1838) by Charles Dickens, the central character challenges the class system when: “Child as he was, he was desperate with hunger and reckless with misery. He rose from the table, and advancing basin and spoon in hand, to the master, said, somewhat alarmed at his own temerity–‘Please, sir, I want some more’” (11). Scarlett O’Hara in Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1936) makes a similar point, a little more dramatically, when she declares: “As God is my witness, I’m never going to be hungry again” (419). Food can also take us into the depths of another culture: places that many of us will only ever read about. Food is also used to provide insight into a character’s state of mind. In Nora Ephron’s Heartburn (1983) an item as simple as boiled bread tells a reader so much more about Rachel Samstat than her preferred bakery items: “So we got married and I got pregnant and I gave up my New York apartment and moved to Washington. Talk about mistakes [...] there I was, trying to hold up my end in a city where you can’t even buy a decent bagel” (34). There are three ways in which writers can deal with food within their work. Firstly, food can be totally ignored. This approach is sometimes taken despite food being such a standard feature of storytelling that its absence, be it a lonely meal at home, elegant canapés at an impressively catered cocktail party, or a cheap sandwich collected from a local café, is an obvious omission. Food can also add realism to a story, with many authors putting as much effort into conjuring the smell, taste, and texture of food as they do into providing a backstory and a purpose for their characters. In recent years, a third way has emerged with some writers placing such importance upon food in fiction that the line that divides the cookbook and the novel has become distorted. This article looks at cookbooks and cookery in popular fiction with a particular focus on crime novels. Recipes: Ingredients and Preparation Food in fiction has been employed, with great success, to help characters cope with grief; giving them the reassurance that only comes through the familiarity of the kitchen and the concentration required to fulfil routine tasks: to chop and dice, to mix, to sift and roll, to bake, broil, grill, steam, and fry. Such grief can come from the breakdown of a relationship as seen in Nora Ephron’s Heartburn (1983). An autobiography under the guise of fiction, this novel is the first-person story of a cookbook author, a description that irritates the narrator as she feels her works “aren’t merely cookbooks” (95). She is, however, grateful she was not described as “a distraught, rejected, pregnant cookbook author whose husband was in love with a giantess” (95). As the collapse of the marriage is described, her favourite recipes are shared: Bacon Hash; Four Minute Eggs; Toasted Almonds; Lima Beans with Pears; Linguine Alla Cecca; Pot Roast; three types of Potatoes; Sorrel Soup; desserts including Bread Pudding, Cheesecake, Key Lime Pie and Peach Pie; and a Vinaigrette, all in an effort to reassert her personal skills and thus personal value. Grief can also result from loss of hope and the realisation that a life long dreamed of will never be realised. Like Water for Chocolate (1989), by Laura Esquivel, is the magical realist tale of Tita De La Garza who, as the youngest daughter, is forbidden to marry as she must take care of her mother, a woman who: “Unquestionably, when it came to dividing, dismantling, dismembering, desolating, detaching, dispossessing, destroying or dominating […] was a pro” (87). Tita’s life lurches from one painful, unjust episode to the next; the only emotional stability she has comes from the kitchen, and from her cooking of a series of dishes: Christmas Rolls; Chabela Wedding Cake; Quail in Rose Petal Sauce; Turkey Mole; Northern-style Chorizo; Oxtail Soup; Champandongo; Chocolate and Three Kings’s Day Bread; Cream Fritters; and Beans with Chilli Tezcucana-style. This is a series of culinary-based activities that attempts to superimpose normalcy on a life that is far from the everyday. Grief is most commonly associated with death. Undertaking the selection, preparation and presentation of meals in novels dealing with bereavement is both a functional and symbolic act: life must go on for those left behind but it must go on in a very different way. Thus, novels that use food to deal with loss are particularly important because they can “make non-cooks believe they can cook, and for frequent cooks, affirm what they already know: that cooking heals” (Baltazar online). In Angelina’s Bachelors (2011) by Brian O’Reilly, Angelina D’Angelo believes “cooking was not just about food. It was about character” (2). By the end of the first chapter the young woman’s husband is dead and she is in the kitchen looking for solace, and survival, in cookery. In The Kitchen Daughter (2011) by Jael McHenry, Ginny Selvaggio is struggling to cope with the death of her parents and the friends and relations who crowd her home after the funeral. Like Angelina, Ginny retreats to the kitchen. There are, of course, exceptions. In Ntozake Shange’s Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo (1982), cooking celebrates, comforts, and seduces (Calta). This story of three sisters from South Carolina is told through diary entries, narrative, letters, poetry, songs, and spells. Recipes are also found throughout the text: Turkey; Marmalade; Rice; Spinach; Crabmeat; Fish; Sweetbread; Duck; Lamb; and, Asparagus. Anthony Capella’s The Food of Love (2004), a modern retelling of the classic tale of Cyrano de Bergerac, is about the beautiful Laura, a waiter masquerading as a top chef Tommaso, and the talented Bruno who, “thick-set, heavy, and slightly awkward” (21), covers for Tommaso’s incompetency in the kitchen as he, too, falls for Laura. The novel contains recipes and contains considerable information about food: Take fusilli […] People say this pasta was designed by Leonardo da Vinci himself. The spiral fins carry the biggest amount of sauce relative to the surface area, you see? But it only works with a thick, heavy sauce that can cling to the grooves. Conchiglie, on the other hand, is like a shell, so it holds a thin, liquid sauce inside it perfectly (17). Recipes: Dishing Up Death Crime fiction is a genre with a long history of focusing on food; from the theft of food in the novels of the nineteenth century to the utilisation of many different types of food such as chocolate, marmalade, and sweet omelettes to administer poison (Berkeley, Christie, Sayers), the latter vehicle for arsenic receiving much attention in Harriet Vane’s trial in Dorothy L. Sayers’s Strong Poison (1930). The Judge, in summing up the case, states to the members of the jury: “Four eggs were brought to the table in their shells, and Mr Urquhart broke them one by one into a bowl, adding sugar from a sifter [...he then] cooked the omelette in a chafing dish, filled it with hot jam” (14). Prior to what Timothy Taylor has described as the “pre-foodie era” the crime fiction genre was “littered with corpses whose last breaths smelled oddly sweet, or bitter, or of almonds” (online). Of course not all murders are committed in such a subtle fashion. In Roald Dahl’s Lamb to the Slaughter (1953), Mary Maloney murders her policeman husband, clubbing him over the head with a frozen leg of lamb. The meat is roasting nicely when her husband’s colleagues arrive to investigate his death, the lamb is offered and consumed: the murder weapon now beyond the recovery of investigators. Recent years have also seen more and more crime fiction writers present a central protagonist working within the food industry, drawing connections between the skills required for food preparation and those needed to catch a murderer. Working with cooks or crooks, or both, requires planning and people skills in addition to creative thinking, dedication, reliability, stamina, and a willingness to take risks. Kent Carroll insists that “food and mysteries just go together” (Carroll in Calta), with crime fiction website Stop, You’re Killing Me! listing, at the time of writing, over 85 culinary-based crime fiction series, there is certainly sufficient evidence to support his claim. Of the numerous works available that focus on food there are many series that go beyond featuring food and beverages, to present recipes as well as the solving of crimes. These include: the Candy Holliday Murder Mysteries by B. B. Haywood; the Coffeehouse Mysteries by Cleo Coyle; the Hannah Swensen Mysteries by Joanne Fluke; the Hemlock Falls Mysteries by Claudia Bishop; the Memphis BBQ Mysteries by Riley Adams; the Piece of Cake Mysteries by Jacklyn Brady; the Tea Shop Mysteries by Laura Childs; and, the White House Chef Mysteries by Julie Hyzy. The vast majority of offerings within this female dominated sub-genre that has been labelled “Crime and Dine” (Collins online) are American, both in origin and setting. A significant contribution to this increasingly popular formula is, however, from an Australian author Kerry Greenwood. Food features within her famed Phryne Fisher Series with recipes included in A Question of Death (2007). Recipes also form part of Greenwood’s food-themed collection of short crime stories Recipes for Crime (1995), written with Jenny Pausacker. These nine stories, each one imitating the style of one of crime fiction’s greatest contributors (from Agatha Christie to Raymond Chandler), allow readers to simultaneously access mysteries and recipes. 2004 saw the first publication of Earthly Delights and the introduction of her character, Corinna Chapman. This series follows the adventures of a woman who gave up a career as an accountant to open her own bakery in Melbourne. Corinna also investigates the occasional murder. Recipes can be found at the end of each of these books with the Corinna Chapman Recipe Book (nd), filled with instructions for baking bread, muffins and tea cakes in addition to recipes for main courses such as risotto, goulash, and “Chicken with Pineapple 1971 Style”, available from the publisher’s website. Recipes: Integration and Segregation In Heartburn (1983), Rachel acknowledges that presenting a work of fiction and a collection of recipes within a single volume can present challenges, observing: “I see that I haven’t managed to work in any recipes for a while. It’s hard to work in recipes when you’re moving the plot forward” (99). How Rachel tells her story is, however, a reflection of how she undertakes her work, with her own cookbooks being, she admits, more narration than instruction: “The cookbooks I write do well. They’re very personal and chatty–they’re cookbooks in an almost incidental way. I write chapters about friends or relatives or trips or experiences, and work in the recipes peripherally” (17). Some authors integrate detailed recipes into their narratives through description and dialogue. An excellent example of this approach can be found in the Coffeehouse Mystery Series by Cleo Coyle, in the novel On What Grounds (2003). When the central protagonist is being questioned by police, Clare Cosi’s answers are interrupted by a flashback scene and instructions on how to make Greek coffee: Three ounces of water and one very heaped teaspoon of dark roast coffee per serving. (I used half Italian roast, and half Maracaibo––a lovely Venezuelan coffee, named after the country’s major port; rich in flavour, with delicate wine overtones.) / Water and finely ground beans both go into the ibrik together. The water is then brought to a boil over medium heat (37). This provides insight into Clare’s character; that, when under pressure, she focuses her mind on what she firmly believes to be true – not the information that she is doubtful of or a situation that she is struggling to understand. Yet breaking up the action within a novel in this way–particularly within crime fiction, a genre that is predominantly dependant upon generating tension and building the pacing of the plotting to the climax–is an unusual but ultimately successful style of writing. Inquiry and instruction are comfortable bedfellows; as the central protagonists within these works discover whodunit, the readers discover who committed murder as well as a little bit more about one of the world’s most popular beverages, thus highlighting how cookbooks and novels both serve to entertain and to educate. Many authors will save their recipes, serving them up at the end of a story. This can be seen in Julie Hyzy’s White House Chef Mystery novels, the cover of each volume in the series boasts that it “includes Recipes for a Complete Presidential Menu!” These menus, with detailed ingredients lists, instructions for cooking and options for serving, are segregated from the stories and appear at the end of each work. Yet other writers will deploy a hybrid approach such as the one seen in Like Water for Chocolate (1989), where the ingredients are listed at the commencement of each chapter and the preparation for the recipes form part of the narrative. This method of integration is also deployed in The Kitchen Daughter (2011), which sees most of the chapters introduced with a recipe card, those chapters then going on to deal with action in the kitchen. Using recipes as chapter breaks is a structure that has, very recently, been adopted by Australian celebrity chef, food writer, and, now fiction author, Ed Halmagyi, in his new work, which is both cookbook and novel, The Food Clock: A Year of Cooking Seasonally (2012). As people exchange recipes in reality, so too do fictional characters. The Recipe Club (2009), by Andrea Israel and Nancy Garfinkel, is the story of two friends, Lilly Stone and Valerie Rudman, which is structured as an epistolary novel. As they exchange feelings, ideas and news in their correspondence, they also exchange recipes: over eighty of them throughout the novel in e-mails and letters. In The Food of Love (2004), written messages between two of the main characters are also used to share recipes. In addition, readers are able to post their own recipes, inspired by this book and other works by Anthony Capella, on the author’s website. From Page to Plate Some readers are contributing to the burgeoning food tourism market by seeking out the meals from the pages of their favourite novels in bars, cafés, and restaurants around the world, expanding the idea of “map as menu” (Spang 79). In Shannon McKenna Schmidt’s and Joni Rendon’s guide to literary tourism, Novel Destinations (2009), there is an entire section, “Eat Your Words: Literary Places to Sip and Sup”, dedicated to beverages and food. The listings include details for John’s Grill, in San Francisco, which still has on the menu Sam Spade’s Lamb Chops, served with baked potato and sliced tomatoes: a meal enjoyed by author Dashiell Hammett and subsequently consumed by his well-known protagonist in The Maltese Falcon (193), and the Café de la Paix, in Paris, frequented by Ian Fleming’s James Bond because “the food was good enough and it amused him to watch the people” (197). Those wanting to follow in the footsteps of writers can go to Harry’s Bar, in Venice, where the likes of Marcel Proust, Sinclair Lewis, Somerset Maugham, Ernest Hemingway, and Truman Capote have all enjoyed a drink (195) or The Eagle and Child, in Oxford, which hosted the regular meetings of the Inklings––a group which included C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien––in the wood-panelled Rabbit Room (203). A number of eateries have developed their own literary themes such as the Peacocks Tearooms, in Cambridgeshire, which blends their own teas. Readers who are also tea drinkers can indulge in the Sherlock Holmes (Earl Grey with Lapsang Souchong) and the Doctor Watson (Keemun and Darjeeling with Lapsang Souchong). Alternatively, readers may prefer to side with the criminal mind and indulge in the Moriarty (Black Chai with Star Anise, Pepper, Cinnamon, and Fennel) (Peacocks). The Moat Bar and Café, in Melbourne, situated in the basement of the State Library of Victoria, caters “to the whimsy and fantasy of the fiction housed above” and even runs a book exchange program (The Moat). For those readers who are unable, or unwilling, to travel the globe in search of such savoury and sweet treats there is a wide variety of locally-based literary lunches and other meals, that bring together popular authors and wonderful food, routinely organised by book sellers, literature societies, and publishing houses. There are also many cookbooks now easily obtainable that make it possible to re-create fictional food at home. One of the many examples available is The Book Lover’s Cookbook (2003) by Shaunda Kennedy Wenger and Janet Kay Jensen, a work containing over three hundred pages of: Breakfasts; Main & Side Dishes; Soups; Salads; Appetizers, Breads & Other Finger Foods; Desserts; and Cookies & Other Sweets based on the pages of children’s books, literary classics, popular fiction, plays, poetry, and proverbs. If crime fiction is your preferred genre then you can turn to Jean Evans’s The Crime Lover’s Cookbook (2007), which features short stories in between the pages of recipes. There is also Estérelle Payany’s Recipe for Murder (2010) a beautifully illustrated volume that presents detailed instructions for Pigs in a Blanket based on the Big Bad Wolf’s appearance in The Three Little Pigs (44–7), and Roast Beef with Truffled Mashed Potatoes, which acknowledges Patrick Bateman’s fondness for fine dining in Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho (124–7). Conclusion Cookbooks and many popular fiction novels are reflections of each other in terms of creativity, function, and structure. In some instances the two forms are so closely entwined that a single volume will concurrently share a narrative while providing information about, and instruction, on cookery. Indeed, cooking in books is becoming so popular that the line that traditionally separated cookbooks from other types of books, such as romance or crime novels, is becoming increasingly distorted. The separation between food and fiction is further blurred by food tourism and how people strive to experience some of the foods found within fictional works at bars, cafés, and restaurants around the world or, create such experiences in their own homes using fiction-themed recipe books. Food has always been acknowledged as essential for life; books have long been acknowledged as food for thought and food for the soul. 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Introduction This paper offers a survey of familiar popular music performers and songwriters who reference coffee in their work. It examines three areas of discourse: the psychoactive effects of caffeine, coffee and courtship rituals, and the politics of coffee consumption. I claim that coffee carries a cultural and musicological significance comparable to that of the chemical stimulants and consumer goods more readily associated with popular music. Songs about coffee may not be as potent as those featuring drugs and alcohol (Primack; Schapiro), or as common as those referencing commodities like clothes and cars (Englis; McCracken), but they do feature across a wide range of genres, some of which enjoy archetypal associations with this beverage. m.o.m.m.y. Needs c.o.f.f.e.e.: The Psychoactive Effect of Coffee The act of performing and listening to popular music involves psychological elements comparable to the overwhelming sensory experience of drug taking: altered perceptions, repetitive grooves, improvisation, self-expression, and psychological empathy—such as that between musician and audience (Curry). Most popular music genres are, as a result, culturally and sociologically identified with the consumption of at least one mind-altering substance (Lyttle; Primack; Schapiro). While the analysis of lyrics referring to this theme has hitherto focused on illegal drugs and alcoholic beverages (Cooper), coffee and its psychoactive ingredient caffeine have been almost entirely overlooked (Summer). The most recent study of drugs in popular music, for example, defined substance use as “tobacco, alcohol, marijuana, cocaine and other stimulants, heroin and other opiates, hallucinogens, inhalants, prescription drugs, over-the-counter drugs, and nonspecific substances” (Primack 172), thereby ignoring a chemical stimulant consumed by 90 per cent of adult Americans every day (Lovett). The wide availability of coffee and the comparatively mild effect of caffeine means that its consumption rarely causes harm. One researcher has described it as a ubiquitous and unobtrusive “generalised public activity […] ‘invisible’ to analysts seeking distinctive social events” (Cooper 92). Coffee may provide only a relatively mild “buzz”—but it is now accepted that caffeine is an addictive substance (Juliano) and, due to its universal legality, coffee is also the world’s most extensively traded and enthusiastically consumed psychoactive consumer product (Juliano 1). The musical genre of jazz has a longstanding relationship with marijuana and narcotics (Curry; Singer; Tolson; Winick). Unsurprisingly, given its Round Midnight connotations, jazz standards also celebrate the restorative impact of coffee. Exemplary compositions include Burke/Webster’s insomniac torch song Black Coffee, which provided hits for Sarah Vaughan (1949), Ella Fitzgerald (1953), and Peggy Lee (1960); and Frank Sinatra’s recordings of Hilliard/Dick’s The Coffee Song (1946, 1960), which satirised the coffee surplus in Brazil at a time when this nation enjoyed a near monopoly on production. Sinatra joked that this ubiquitous drink was that country’s only means of liquid refreshment, in a refrain that has since become a headline writer’s phrasal template: “There’s an Awful Lot of Coffee in Vietnam,” “An Awful Lot of Coffee in the Bin,” and “There’s an Awful Lot of Taxes in Brazil.” Ethnographer Aaron Fox has shown how country music gives expression to the lived social experience of blue-collar and agrarian workers (Real 29). Coffee’s role in energising working class America (Cooper) is featured in such recordings as Dolly Parton’s Nine To Five (1980), which describes her morning routine using a memorable “kitchen/cup of ambition” rhyme, and Don't Forget the Coffee Billy Joe (1973) by Tom T. Hall which laments the hardship of unemployment, hunger, cold, and lack of healthcare. Country music’s “tired truck driver” is the most enduring blue-collar trope celebrating coffee’s analeptic powers. Versions include Truck Drivin' Man by Buck Owens (1964), host of the country TV show Hee Haw and pioneer of the Bakersfield sound, and Driving My Life Away from pop-country crossover star Eddie Rabbitt (1980). Both feature characteristically gendered stereotypes of male truck drivers pushing on through the night with the help of a truck stop waitress who has fuelled them with caffeine. Johnny Cash’s A Cup of Coffee (1966), recorded at the nadir of his addiction to pills and alcohol, has an incoherent improvised lyric on this subject; while Jerry Reed even prescribed amphetamines to keep drivers awake in Caffein [sic], Nicotine, Benzedrine (And Wish Me Luck) (1980). Doye O’Dell’s Diesel Smoke, Dangerous Curves (1952) is the archetypal “truck drivin’ country” song and the most exciting track of its type. It subsequently became a hit for the doyen of the subgenre, Red Simpson (1966). An exhausted driver, having spent the night with a woman whose name he cannot now recall, is fighting fatigue and wrestling his hot-rod low-loader around hairpin mountain curves in an attempt to rendezvous with a pretty truck stop waitress. The song’s palpable energy comes from its frenetic guitar picking and the danger implicit in trailing a heavy load downhill while falling asleep at the wheel. Tommy Faile’s Phantom 309, a hit for Red Sovine (1967) that was later covered by Tom Waits (Big Joe and the Phantom 309, 1975), elevates the “tired truck driver” narrative to gothic literary form. Reflecting country music’s moral code of citizenship and its culture of performative storytelling (Fox, Real 23), it tells of a drenched and exhausted young hitchhiker picked up by Big Joe—the driver of a handsome eighteen-wheeler. On arriving at a truck stop, Joe drops the traveller off, giving him money for a restorative coffee. The diner falls silent as the hitchhiker orders up his “cup of mud”. Big Joe, it transpires, is a phantom trucker. After running off the road to avoid a school bus, his distinctive ghost rig now only reappears to rescue stranded travellers. Punk rock, a genre closely associated with recreational amphetamines (McNeil 76, 87), also features a number of caffeine-as-stimulant songs. Californian punk band, Descendents, identified caffeine as their drug of choice in two 1996 releases, Coffee Mug and Kids on Coffee. These songs describe chugging the drink with much the same relish and energy that others might pull at the neck of a beer bottle, and vividly compare the effects of the drug to the intense rush of speed. The host of “New Music News” (a segment of MTV’s 120 Minutes) references this correlation in 1986 while introducing the band’s video—in which they literally bounce off the walls: “You know, while everybody is cracking down on crack, what about that most respectable of toxic substances or stimulants, the good old cup of coffee? That is the preferred high, actually, of California’s own Descendents—it is also the subject of their brand new video” (“New Music News”). Descendents’s Sessions EP (1997) featured an overflowing cup of coffee on the sleeve, while punk’s caffeine-as-amphetamine trope is also promulgated by Hellbender (Caffeinated 1996), Lagwagon (Mr. Coffee 1997), and Regatta 69 (Addicted to Coffee 2005). Coffee in the Morning and Kisses in the Night: Coffee and Courtship Coffee as romantic metaphor in song corroborates the findings of early researchers who examined courtship rituals in popular music. Donald Horton’s 1957 study found that hit songs codified the socially constructed self-image and limited life expectations of young people during the 1950s by depicting conservative, idealised, and traditional relationship scenarios. He summarised these as initial courtship, honeymoon period, uncertainty, and parting (570-4). Eleven years after this landmark analysis, James Carey replicated Horton’s method. His results revealed that pop lyrics had become more realistic and less bound by convention during the 1960s. They incorporated a wider variety of discourse including the temporariness of romantic commitment, the importance of individual autonomy in relationships, more liberal attitudes, and increasingly unconventional courtship behaviours (725). Socially conservative coffee songs include Coffee in the Morning and Kisses in the Night by The Boswell Sisters (1933) in which the protagonist swears fidelity to her partner on condition that this desire is expressed strictly in the appropriate social context of marriage. It encapsulates the restrictions Horton identified on courtship discourse in popular song prior to the arrival of rock and roll. The Henderson/DeSylva/Brown composition You're the Cream in My Coffee, recorded by Annette Hanshaw (1928) and by Nat King Cole (1946), also celebrates the social ideal of monogamous devotion. The persistence of such idealised traditional themes continued into the 1960s. American pop singer Don Cherry had a hit with Then You Can Tell Me Goodbye (1962) that used coffee as a metaphor for undying and everlasting love. Otis Redding’s version of Butler/Thomas/Walker’s Cigarettes and Coffee (1966)—arguably soul music’s exemplary romantic coffee song—carries a similar message as a couple proclaim their devotion in a late night conversation over coffee. Like much of the Stax catalogue, Cigarettes and Coffee, has a distinctly “down home” feel and timbre. The lovers are simply content with each other; they don’t need “cream” or “sugar.” Horton found 1950s blues and R&B lyrics much more sexually explicit than pop songs (567). Dawson (1994) subsequently characterised black popular music as a distinct public sphere, and Squires (2002) argued that it displayed elements of what she defined as “enclave” and “counterpublic” traits. Lawson (2010) has argued that marginalised and/or subversive blues artists offered a form of countercultural resistance against prevailing social norms. Indeed, several blues and R&B coffee songs disregard established courtship ideals and associate the product with non-normative and even transgressive relationship circumstances—including infidelity, divorce, and domestic violence. Lightnin’ Hopkins’s Coffee Blues (1950) references child neglect and spousal abuse, while the narrative of Muddy Waters’s scorching Iodine in my Coffee (1952) tells of an attempted poisoning by his Waters’s partner. In 40 Cups of Coffee (1953) Ella Mae Morse is waiting for her husband to return home, fuelling her anger and anxiety with caffeine. This song does eventually comply with traditional courtship ideals: when her lover eventually returns home at five in the morning, he is greeted with a relieved kiss. In Keep That Coffee Hot (1955), Scatman Crothers supplies a counterpoint to Morse’s late-night-abandonment narrative, asking his partner to keep his favourite drink warm during his adulterous absence. Brook Benton’s Another Cup of Coffee (1964) expresses acute feelings of regret and loneliness after a failed relationship. More obliquely, in Coffee Blues (1966) Mississippi John Hurt sings affectionately about his favourite brand, a “lovin’ spoonful” of Maxwell House. In this, he bequeathed the moniker of folk-rock band The Lovin’ Spoonful, whose hits included Do You Believe in Magic (1965) and Summer in the City (1966). However, an alternative reading of Hurt’s lyric suggests that this particular phrase is a metaphorical device proclaiming the author’s sexual potency. Hurt’s “lovin’ spoonful” may actually be a portion of his seminal emission. In the 1950s, Horton identified country as particularly “doleful” (570), and coffee provides a common metaphor for failed romance in a genre dominated by “metanarratives of loss and desire” (Fox, Jukebox 54). Claude Gray’s I'll Have Another Cup of Coffee (Then I’ll Go) (1961) tells of a protagonist delivering child support payments according to his divorce lawyer’s instructions. The couple share late night coffee as their children sleep through the conversation. This song was subsequently recorded by seventeen-year-old Bob Marley (One Cup of Coffee, 1962) under the pseudonym Bobby Martell, a decade prior to his breakthrough as an international reggae star. Marley’s youngest son Damian has also performed the track while, interestingly in the context of this discussion, his older sibling Rohan co-founded Marley Coffee, an organic farm in the Jamaican Blue Mountains. Following Carey’s demonstration of mainstream pop’s increasingly realistic depiction of courtship behaviours during the 1960s, songwriters continued to draw on coffee as a metaphor for failed romance. In Carly Simon’s You’re So Vain (1972), she dreams of clouds in her coffee while contemplating an ostentatious ex-lover. Squeeze’s Black Coffee In Bed (1982) uses a coffee stain metaphor to describe the end of what appears to be yet another dead-end relationship for the protagonist. Sarah Harmer’s Coffee Stain (1998) expands on this device by reworking the familiar “lipstick on your collar” trope, while Sexsmith & Kerr’s duet Raindrops in my Coffee (2005) superimposes teardrops in coffee and raindrops on the pavement with compelling effect. Kate Bush’s Coffee Homeground (1978) provides the most extreme narrative of relationship breakdown: the true story of Cora Henrietta Crippin’s poisoning. Researchers who replicated Horton’s and Carey’s methodology in the late 1970s (Bridges; Denisoff) were surprised to find their results dominated by traditional courtship ideals. The new liberal values unearthed by Carey in the late 1960s simply failed to materialise in subsequent decades. In this context, it is interesting to observe how romantic coffee songs in contemporary soul and jazz continue to disavow the post-1960s trend towards realistic social narratives, adopting instead a conspicuously consumerist outlook accompanied by smooth musical timbres. This phenomenon possibly betrays the influence of contemporary coffee advertising. From the 1980s, television commercials have sought to establish coffee as a desirable high end product, enjoyed by bohemian lovers in a conspicuously up-market environment (Werder). All Saints’s Black Coffee (2000) and Lebrado’s Coffee (2006) identify strongly with the culture industry’s image of coffee as a luxurious beverage whose consumption signifies prominent social status. All Saints’s promotional video is set in a opulent location (although its visuals emphasise the lyric’s romantic disharmony), while Natalie Cole’s Coffee Time (2008) might have been itself written as a commercial. Busting Up a Starbucks: The Politics of Coffee Politics and coffee meet most palpably at the coffee shop. This conjunction has a well-documented history beginning with the establishment of coffee houses in Europe and the birth of the public sphere (Habermas; Love; Pincus). The first popular songs to reference coffee shops include Jaybird Coleman’s Coffee Grinder Blues (1930), which boasts of skills that precede the contemporary notion of a barista by four decades; and Let's Have Another Cup of Coffee (1932) from Irving Berlin’s depression-era musical Face The Music, where the protagonists decide to stay in a restaurant drinking coffee and eating pie until the economy improves. Coffee in a Cardboard Cup (1971) from the Broadway musical 70 Girls 70 is an unambiguous condemnation of consumerism, however, it was written, recorded and produced a generation before Starbucks’ aggressive expansion and rapid dominance of the coffee house market during the 1990s. The growth of this company caused significant criticism and protest against what seemed to be a ruthless homogenising force that sought to overwhelm local competition (Holt; Thomson). In response, Starbucks has sought to be defined as a more responsive and interactive brand that encourages “glocalisation” (de Larios; Thompson). Koller, however, has characterised glocalisation as the manipulative fabrication of an “imagined community”—whose heterogeneity is in fact maintained by the aesthetics and purchasing choices of consumers who make distinctive and conscious anti-brand statements (114). Neat Capitalism is a more useful concept here, one that intercedes between corporate ideology and postmodern cultural logic, where such notions as community relations and customer satisfaction are deliberately and perhaps somewhat cynically conflated with the goal of profit maximisation (Rojek). As the world’s largest chain of coffee houses with over 19,400 stores in March 2012 (Loxcel), Starbucks is an exemplar of this phenomenon. Their apparent commitment to environmental stewardship, community relations, and ethical sourcing is outlined in the company’s annual “Global Responsibility Report” (Vimac). It is also demonstrated in their engagement with charitable and environmental non-governmental organisations such as Fairtrade and Co-operative for Assistance and Relief Everywhere (CARE). By emphasising this, Starbucks are able to interpellate (that is, “call forth”, “summon”, or “hail” in Althusserian terms) those consumers who value environmental protection, social justice and ethical business practices (Rojek 117). Bob Dylan and Sheryl Crow provide interesting case studies of the persuasive cultural influence evoked by Neat Capitalism. Dylan’s 1962 song Talkin’ New York satirised his formative experiences as an impoverished performer in Greenwich Village’s coffee houses. In 1995, however, his decision to distribute the Bob Dylan: Live At The Gaslight 1962 CD exclusively via Starbucks generated significant media controversy. Prominent commentators expressed their disapproval (Wilson Harris) and HMV Canada withdrew Dylan’s product from their shelves (Lynskey). Despite this, the success of this and other projects resulted in the launch of Starbucks’s in-house record company, Hear Music, which released entirely new recordings from major artists such as Ray Charles, Paul McCartney, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon and Elvis Costello—although the company has recently announced a restructuring of their involvement in this venture (O’Neil). Sheryl Crow disparaged her former life as a waitress in Coffee Shop (1995), a song recorded for her second album. “Yes, I was a waitress. I was a waitress not so long ago; then I won a Grammy” she affirmed in a YouTube clip of a live performance from the same year. More recently, however, Crow has become an avowed self-proclaimed “Starbucks groupie” (Tickle), releasing an Artist’s Choice (2003) compilation album exclusively via Hear Music and performing at the company’s 2010 Annual Shareholders’s Meeting. Songs voicing more unequivocal dissatisfaction with Starbucks’s particular variant of Neat Capitalism include Busting Up a Starbucks (Mike Doughty, 2005), and Starbucks Takes All My Money (KJ-52, 2008). The most successful of these is undoubtedly Ron Sexsmith’s Jazz at the Bookstore (2006). Sexsmith bemoans the irony of intense original blues artists such as Leadbelly being drowned out by the cacophony of coffee grinding machines while customers queue up to purchase expensive coffees whose names they can’t pronounce. In this, he juxtaposes the progressive patina of corporate culture against the circumstances of African-American labour conditions in the deep South, the shocking incongruity of which eventually cause the old bluesman to turn in his grave. Fredric Jameson may have good reason to lament the depthless a-historical pastiche of postmodern popular culture, but this is no “nostalgia film”: Sexsmith articulates an artfully framed set of subtle, sensitive, and carefully contextualised observations. Songs about coffee also intersect with politics via lyrics that play on the mid-brown colour of the beverage, by employing it as a metaphor for the sociological meta-narratives of acculturation and assimilation. First popularised in Israel Zangwill’s 1905 stage play, The Melting Pot, this term is more commonly associated with Americanisation rather than miscegenation in the United States—a nuanced distinction that British band Blue Mink failed to grasp with their memorable invocation of “coffee-coloured people” in Melting Pot (1969). Re-titled in the US as People Are Together (Mickey Murray, 1970) the song was considered too extreme for mainstream radio airplay (Thompson). Ike and Tina Turner’s Black Coffee (1972) provided a more accomplished articulation of coffee as a signifier of racial identity; first by associating it with the history of slavery and the post-Civil Rights discourse of African-American autonomy, then by celebrating its role as an energising force for African-American workers seeking economic self-determination. Anyone familiar with the re-casting of black popular music in an industry dominated by Caucasian interests and aesthetics (Cashmore; Garofalo) will be unsurprised to find British super-group Humble Pie’s (1973) version of this song more recognisable. Conclusion Coffee-flavoured popular songs celebrate the stimulant effects of caffeine, provide metaphors for courtship rituals, and offer critiques of Neat Capitalism. Harold Love and Guthrie Ramsey have each argued (from different perspectives) that the cultural micro-narratives of small social groups allow us to identify important “ethnographic truths” (Ramsey 22). Aesthetically satisfying and intellectually stimulating coffee songs are found where these micro-narratives intersect with the ethnographic truths of coffee culture. 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The economic crisis caused by the current pandemic that has led to a sharp decline in demand in both the Ukrainian labor market and globally. Employment in the world in 2020 fell not only due to job loss, but also due to inaction: people left the labor market because they could not work due to lockdowns. Problems in the labor market affected more women than men. In all regions of the world, women are more likely to become economically inactive, in other words to drop out of the workforce during this crisis. One of the groups of women at particular risk are women in various occupations who have children of preschool or primary school age. As a result, more than a quarter of working women are considering slowing down their careers or giving up work altogether due to the forced stay of children at home. The most popular women's professions are related to education, training, care and intensive interpersonal communication. The most risky areas in terms of virus infection - medicine, education, household services, retail trade, etc. - are represented mainly by employed women. Considering the specifics of pandemic measures, it is obviously that the service sector has suffered the most from lockdowns and quarantine restrictions. Similar data are published in European and American statistical reports. More women than men are employed in personal care, cleaning and education. The solution of this problem can be considered in three ways simultaneously: at the level of households, enterprises and the state. For households, a more proportionate redistribution of a woman's responsibilities to other family members may be a possible outcome. Businesses may also take a number of measures to mitigate the impact and offset gender disparities in the labor market caused by quarantine restrictions. The state should consider and approve short-term support scenarios for families with children, examples of which can be seen in European countries. Public policy in the long-term should be aimed at forming and introducing into society the norm of the need for active engagement men in household chores and child care on par with women.

IntroductionWhen a baby girl born in Britain was endowed with the topical name ‘Hashtag’, a social media post decried the naming, and a media storm followed. Before she was even home from hospital, headlines were at the ready: “Did a mother really just name her child Hashtag?” (Nye) and “Baby Hashtag: has the search for original names gone too far?” (Barkham). Trollers were also poised to react, offering: “The first name is REALLY dumb. And you're even dumber,” prompting a rejection of the baby’s name as well as her ostensibly ill-equipped parents (Facebook). Dubbed a “Public Figure” on her Facebook page, Hashtag Jameson accrued a particularly premature type of celebrity, where, with a handful of baby selfies, she declared via Twitter, and only hours after birth, that she was “already trending”.In this article, I consider the relationship between the infant child and the visual-digital economies in which it – as in the Hashtag hoax, above – performs. The infant child is brought into view with the very first sentence that frames John Berger’s Ways of Seeing. “Seeing comes before words”, he writes. “The child looks and recognizes before it can speak” (1). Berger’s reference to the seeing child positions it as an active agent in cultures and practices of visuality, but also uses an idea of the child to position vision as the primary communicative means by which we “establish our place in the surrounding world” and in which we are enveloped “before” speech (7). Here, I explore the intensified relationship between the visual culture of infancy and the economised digital movement of vision that it produces in one highly specific image-genre: the baby selfie. In doing so I aim to characterise the depictive nature of this format in terms of how it compositionally documents – to further borrow the language of Berger, who was then discussing oil paintings – “a way of seeing the world, which was ultimately determined by new attitudes to property and exchange” (87).The new sociology of childhood has been concerned with the construction of the child figure as it has interfaced with new cultural and political realities since the early 1980s (Prout). These include “phenomena such as the flexibilization of production … expanding networks of knowledge … and shifts in labour market participation, work and the global economy” (Prout 5). I suggest here that the baby selfie can be seen as an unprecedented social marker of these transformations, signalling a heightened degree of priceless sentiment within which the child – as an animator of amateur affects, viral tendencies and algorithmic logics – is given to operate. I focus on the compositional propensities of the baby selfie in order to characterise how it visually construes a particular kind of self that is intrinsically entangled with the conception of the image as a form of capital exchange. That is, I suggest that in its intense and yet paradoxical self-performativity the baby selfie depicts a way of seeing that is predicated on, but also troubles, the conceit of a commodified social relation. What Does the Baby Selfie Say?“Should babies really be taking selfies?” yells a headline warning against the perceived dangers of youth digital cultures (Cox). The 2014 story references a phone app built by father Matthew Pegula that uses front-facing cameras to “unintentionally teac[h] your baby to take selfies of themselves” by generating “rattling sounds, pictures of cute animals, and more to get the baby’s attention.” The article explains that “[w]hen the baby reaches out to touch the screen, the camera snaps their selfie and saves it to the device”. While Pegula’s Baby Selfie App is available for purchase on Google Play’s app store for $1.09, a similar device named New Born Fame, featuring “Facebook and Twitter symbols that are activated when the youngster reaches for them” and inclusions such as “a pair of shoes with an internal pedometer that tracks kicks and posts the activity online, a squeezable GPS tracker and a ‘selfie-ball’ that photographs the baby and uploads the shot whenever the ball rotates” (Peppers), artistically interrogated this relatively new category of “insta-infa-fame”.In their article “What Does the Selfie Say?”, Theresa M. Senft and Nancy K. Baym argue that the selfie exists as the hallmark genre of a new kind of self-reflexive image-making, one that is formally characterised by the “self-generated” nature of the photographic portraiture it depicts, which is in turn conceived for its transmissibility, occurring “primarily via social media” (1589). Popularised in part by new technologies (the camera phone, the smart phone, and then the front-facing phone camera) and in part by new digital platforms (“Facebook, Instagram, SnapChat, Tumblr, WeChat, and Tinder”) (1589), Senft and Baym further explain that the selfie is simultaneously a photographic object which transmits human feeling, a practice of sending (as well as of depicting), and third, a monetized assemblage curated by nonhuman agents. It is this last factor which renders the objecthood of the selfie as it relates to the vernacular that it enacts as well as the practice of its making, political.Notions around the simultaneously constituting and yet virally distributed “self” of social media are not new. A now prominent literature around how the selfie graphically manifests and performs: intimate publics (Walsh and Baker), a normative or resistive image repertoire (Murray), and emotionalised, communicable affect (Bayer et al.), gives rise to a range of viewpoints that aim to characterise how the hyper self-reflexivity of the selfie depicts – visually as well as ontologically – the self as an agent of their own transmissibility (Holiday et al.). From these we understand that the selfie is distinct for its (i) self-representational image-format (it is an image made by the self, of the self, and thereby is identifiable for its capturing of the self in this very process of self-composition); ii) its methods of distribution (selfies are taken and distributed often instantaneously, and thereby are not only objects of, but active agents of, the reshaping of digitally communicative economies); iii) its idiomatic performance of a sociality and aesthetic of the amateur or vernacular (Abidin).The doubled glance both inwards and outwards that the selfie casts is further characterised for how it traces as well as points to a gestural self-awareness held within its compositional characteristics (Frosh). This moves us from a semiotic reading of the selfie to a reading of its “kineasthetic sociability” – that is, its embodied inception of new forms of autobiographical inscription which say “not only ‘see this, here, now,’ but also ‘see me showing you me’” (Frosh 1609-10). Here, the selfie is less a static object and more a gestural imprint of the communicative action in process: it is “simultaneously mediating (the outstretched arm executes the taking of the selfie) and mediated (the outstretched arm becomes a legible and iterable sign within selfies of, among other things, the selfieness of the image)” (Frosh 1611). In this sense, its compositional logic offers a tracing of this very enactive, embodied tendency, which bears more than an indexical relationship to the field that it marks – it depicts itself as a constituting part of that field.While these characteristics are broadly accepted as being true of selfies, the “selfieness” of a baby selfie might be seen to offer a paradoxical reframing of these depictive qualities. That is, if a selfie is a self-depiction of a process of self-depiction, the baby selfie most usually performs this self-reflexivity with recourse to an external agent who is either present in the image frame or who is occluded from it but nonetheless implied by the very nature of the image (a parent or the image-facilitator, or indeed, a baby app). The baby selfie’s scene of self-depiction, then, might be thought of as a kind of self-depiction-by-proxy. At the same time, the baby selfie asks us to invest in the belief that the picture was knowingly self-taken, and in doing so, models a kind of aspirational autonomy for the child/baby figure who is depicted. In this sense, the baby selfie, by its very nature, disrupts the accepted distinguishing format of the selfie: that the picture is both self-depicting and is self-composed. Instead, the baby selfie can be seen to gesturally reincorporate into its visual scene the very question of this structural im/possibility.Depicting the Viral ChildThe figure of the child has been considered by a range of theorists as the organising principle of modernity. Philippe Aries’ foundational work has argued that the modern discovery of childhood is reflected in the rise of the nuclear family and consequential shifts from sociability to privacy. Viviana Zelizer similarly positions the emergence of the economically “useless” but sentimentally “priceless” child against comprehensive social and industrial transformations taking place across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that excluded the child as a labourer and instead situated it with the disciplinary regime of education. The hetero-normatively white child has since been shown to emblematise concepts of social futurity (Edelman) and myths of morality, humanity and the “ordering of time” (Pelligrini 98).Following Zelizer, the more recently ‘digitally’ visual cultures of childhood can be seen to spin the figure of the child around new socio-economic and discursive imperatives. Lisa Cartwright writes about photographs of waiting adoptee children, in which “children of poor countries become commodities and their images become advertisements in a global market” (83). Deborah Lupton similarly considers the coding of infant bodies in popular media for their “represent[ation] as helpless, vulnerable, uncontrolled, dirty and leaky in opposition to the idealised adult body that is powerful, self-regulated, autonomous, clean, its bodily boundaries sealed from the outside world” (349). More recently, children have been considered for how they either accidentally or volitionally interact with mediated technologies (Nansen) as well as for how they are increasingly digitally surveilled as the objects of a necessary – and increasingly normalised – parental “culture of care” (Leaver 2). These studies make clear that while children are increasingly positioned as the ‘viral’ agents of new kinds of visual markets, they are also infantilised as victims in need of unprecedented cyber-protection.In 1994 Douglas Rushkoff coined the term “media virus” to account for the rapid and uncontrollable ways that popular media texts performed to either coerce or awaken viewing publics. While Rushkoff’s medium of reference was television, Henry Jenkins et al. later reframed virality to instead encompass ideas of user-led agency by linking it with a logic of “stickiness” – evoking what he termed a “peanut butter” analogy to describe the “spreadable” (3) movement of ideas in more recent social media practices. Indeed, Liam French finds a strong parallel between the “phenomenal rise in user generated content” and the turn towards newer visual cultures within social media practices more broadly, noting that it is “ordinary people” (French’s term) who actively generate the very forms of visual cultural production that become key to communicatory circulation. The selfie, in this regard, becomes both a format and an icon of the new ways of seeing brought into perspective by social media practices.Given the political, social and industrial ecologies that constitute such image cultures, it is only recently that the “viral” child, as the next delineation of the sentimentally “priceless” child, has arrived into view. Here, the baby Hashtag hoax can be seen to critically narrate a specific cultural moment: one that is concerned with stabilising the figure of the child even as it constitutes the ground through which that figure also becomes undone. I refer to the way that Hashtag, as a figural baby, presents a tautological identity, where the digital grammar of # names the mechanism by which she would also search for herself. If Hashtag is emblematic of the algorithmic and affective assemblage of contemporary image-cultures of childhood – whose image-work shapes the new temporal dimensions of our watching and viewing practices – she also illustrates how the child has been become not only an object, but a medium of the economic logics of communicative capitalism. That is, the image-work of the baby selfie can be seen to point to the very question of autonomous agency that frames the figure of the child and in doing so, provides a disruptive counterpoint to the “peanut butter” logic of spreadable visual cultures of so-called “ordinary people” more broadly.It is this light that I ask (drawing on Senft and Baym): what does the baby selfie say about how we understand or construe the figure of the child? More specifically, I ask (via Berger) what culture of vision is brought into view by the rise of such visual cultures of the viral child? The “Gestural Gaze” of Digital Infant Agency Ellentv.com recently advertised a call for viewers to send in their favourite baby selfies: “If you've got a baby and a camera, it's time to take some selfies! Take a photo of you and your baby making the same face, and send it to us!” The legal disclaimer accompanying the callout additionally advised that “[b]y submitting Materials, … you … do not violate the right of privacy or publicity of, or constitute a defamation against, any person or entity; that the Materials will not infringe upon or violate the copyright or common law rights or any other rights of any person or entity” (Ellentv.com). From the outset, there appears within baby selfie culture a curious calibration of the agency of the child, who is at once a selfie-self-taker but who is also excluded from a legal right to privacy that concerns “any person or entity”. In this respect we might further ask – following Jacqueline Bhabha’s question “what sort of human is a child?” (1526) – what sort of human is a viral child, and how does the baby selfie depict this paradoxical configuration of infantile agency?While the formality of the baby selfie still demonstrates a range of configurations which often incorporate the figure of a parent and hence contradict the discreet self-composing parameters of the selfie, here I focus in closing on one specific baby selfie that I suggest is emblematic of an increasing prevalence of apparently “true” baby selfies which operate on a range of image-sharing platforms and meme sites. These baby selfies are distinguished by seeming to be (i) an image that is made by the self, of the self, and thereby is identified for its capturing of the self in this very process of self-composition; ii) an image that is construed for methods of often instantaneous distribution; iii) an image that puts forward an idiomatic performance of an amateur vernacular – or what Abidin has called “calibrated amateurism”.One compilation, “12 of the Cutest Baby Selfies You Will Ever See”, foregrounds the autonomy of the figure of the viral child as depicted by baby selfie culture, explaining that “These babies might be small, but they can do a lot more than just laugh, crawl, and play. It turns out they can also work their way around a camera and snap some amazing selfies. Talk about impressive!” (Campbell). While all the images in the selection depict the embodied gestural sociality of the selfie that Frosh characterises – that which is “simultaneously mediating (the outstretched arm executes the taking of the selfie) and mediated (the outstretched arm becomes a legible and iterable sign within selfies of … the selfieness of the image)” (1611) – one in particular is arresting for its striking interpellation of the “innocent” figure of the child with what I will extend via Frosh to call the inherent mediality of her gestural gaze. In this iconic baby selfie, the gestural gaze is witnessed in the way that the baby’s outstretched hand seems to be extending towards us, the viewer, but is rather (we think we know) extended towards the phone camera, in order to better see herself.The infant in the image is coded female, wearing a pink bonnet, dummy clip and dummy. The dummy is centred defiantly in the baby’s mouth and doubly defiantly in the centre of the image frame as an infantile ‘technology’ that seems to undercut the technology of the phone camera apparatus. The dummy imbues the image with an iconic sense of the baby’s innate “baby-ness” which seems to directly contradict the strength of her gaze, which also appears, in following the outwards arc of her selfie-taking arm, to reach beyond the image frame and address her viewer directly. It seems to say – to paraphrase Frosh – see me here, now, showing you me. The ambivalent origins of the image are also key to how it is read and distributed here. The image in question can be found on the media site Woman’s World, which offers an untraceable credit to Instagram for its original source. The image has also, since, spread itself, appearing across a range of other multilingual sites and feeds, depicting the child at the centre of its frame as somewhat entangled in a further labour of self-duplication. The baby selfie in circulation says not only “‘see this, here, now,’” and “‘see me showing you me’,” but ‘see all of this here, and again, here and again, here.’John Berger writes of two related image genres that connect histories of vernacular depiction to histories of the evolution of the publicity image as a medium and sign of capital exchange. Writing on oil painting, he notes how the materiality of the medium signified the “thingness” of its depiction: “if you buy a painting you also buy a look of the thing that it represents” (83). He finds, therein, an “analogy between possessing and a way of seeing which is incorporated in oil painting” (83) and which, as he later explains, becomes tied to “the tangibility, the texture, the lustre, the solidity of what it depicts” (88). The textural qualities of oil painting, which for Berger construe the “real” as that which can be materially conveyed or indexed as commodity, might be compared to the gestural residue that is contained within the selfie. While oil painting construed the materiality of things – and hence, the commodifiable nature of any particular relation – the selfie might be seen to depict the self in the process of its own self-labour: the material gesture of taking the image necessitates that the self becomes an agent who then becomes the immaterial self of transmission. The selfie is in this way a depiction of the self in a form of capital relation to itself.While the selfie – as a digital composition – is not materially “real” in the same way that oil painting is, the indexical nature of the arm that reaches out beyond the image frame to point to the inherent transmissibility – and hence capital value – of the image, might be. While the baby selfie imitates these capacities, I suggest here that it also traces a compositional logic that further complicates that which Frosh charts. This is because in the very moment that the spectator of the image is confronted with the baby selfie’s call to “see me showing you me” (1609-10), the spectator is also confronted with the figure of the infant as an autonomous agent capable of their own image-constitution. In essence, the baby selfie posits a question around the baby’s innate ability to knowingly generate its image-frame, even as that very image-frame is what casts the infant into the spreadable contexts within which it will then operate – or, indeed, become ‘knowable’.In its heightened self-referentiality but tenuously depicted sense of rhetorical agency, the baby selfie then faces us with what we think we know, or do not know, about the figure of the child. This central ambivalence inherent to the compositional makeup of the baby selfie in this way both depicts and disrupts the economics of circulation that are intrinsic to selfies more broadly, pointing to a decomposing of the parameters by which a selfie is interpreted and understood. Further, it enables us to question relationships between ways of seeing and ways of being – how does the baby selfie envision the figure of the chid? What sort of human does it become? While there are valid discussions to be had around the absence of “direct self-representational agency” (Leaver) and moral rights or wrongs of the parental management of children’s image-work in online spaces, the baby selfie also opens up questions around how we understand the very contours of infantile agency, how we perceive rhetorical knowingness, and what we mean to mean by the relentless circulation of this imagery of the viral child. Indeed, as Wendy S. Hesford writes, it can be helpful to shift an understanding of agency from being an “individual enterprise” to being understood as that which is “enabled and constrained by cultural discourses and material forces” that compel it into material circulation (156).Here, I am not aiming to foreclose debates about the role of infants (or children more broadly) living with and in digital cultures. Neither do I aim to cast judgement upon on those image practices which enfold child subjects within them. I rather aim to circumvent those important debates to find – following Berger – a trace of how the image cultures that co-constitute digital infancies operate to formulate as well as depict a new field of vision that is predicated upon a seemingly impossible but nonetheless compelling logic of the contradictory impulses of the viral child. That is, it challenges us to think more carefully about what we think we know about children as well as about how we come to know them.ReferencesAbidin, Crystal. “#familygoals: Family Influencers, Calibrated Amateurism, and Justifying Young Digital Labor.” Social Media + Society (Apr.-June 2017): 1–15.Aries, Philippe. Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life. Trans. Robert Baldick. 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The Dangling Mobile That Lets Newborns Post Selfies and Videos Online from the Crib.” Daily Mail Australia, 25 Oct. 2014. <http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2806761/Social-media-BABIES-dangling-mobile-lets-newborns-post-selfies-videos-online-crib.html>.Prout, Alan. “Taking a Step Away from Modernity: Reconsidering the New Sociology of Childhood.” Global Studies of Childhood 1.1 (2011): 4–14.Rushkoff, Douglas. Media Virus! New York: Ballantine Books, 1996.Senft, Theresa M., and Nancy K. Baym. “What Does the Selfie Say? Investigating a Global Phenomenon.” International Journal of Communication 9 (2015): 1588–1606.Walsh, Michael James, and Stephanie Alice Baker. ‘The Selfie and the Transformation of the Public–Private Distinction.” Information, Communication & Society 20.8 (2017): 1185–1203.Zelizer, Viviana. Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children. New Jersey: Princeton UP, 1994.

Prelude: 2020 in Words Each year the Australian National Dictionary Centre, based at the Australian National University (ANU), selects “a word or expression that has gained prominence in the Australian social landscape”. In 2020, “iso” took out first place, with “bubble” following close behind. On the Centre’s website, Senior Researcher Mark Gywnn explains that “iso” was selected not only for its flexibility, merrily combining with other words to create new compound words (for instance “being in iso”, doing “iso baking” and putting on “iso weight”), but also because it “stood out as a characteristically Aussie abbreviation” (Australian National Dictionary Centre). Alongside the flexibility of the word “iso” and its affinity with the Australian English tradition of producing and embracing diminutives, iso’s appeal might well be that it does not carry the associations that the word “bubble” has acquired in the time of COVID. While COVID-19 has put many of us in various forms of “iso”, the media imagery—and indeed experiences—of many older people living in residential aged care during COVID has shifted some of the associations of the word “bubble”, heightening its associations with fragility and adding vulnerability and helplessness into the mix. 2020 was not the first time “bubble” has appeared in the Australian word of the year list. In 2018 “Canberra bubble” took out the first spot. What interests us about bubble’s runner-up position behind “iso” in 2020’s word of the year is what this might also reveal about the way ideas of independence vs dependence, and youthfulness vs aged underlie and inflect new usages of these words. In the era of COVID-19, the buoyancy of “iso” is tied to its association with a particular kind of Aussie-youth-speak, while the sense of heaviness and negative resonances that now accompany the word bubble are tied to its associations with the experiences of those in aged care. In 2020 “bubble”—a word that has primarily been associated with children and the child-like (bubble baths, bubble tea)—took on new associations and overtones. As the pandemic unfolded, “bubble” also became intertwined with media depictions of and popular discourses around those in later life, many of whom experienced “iso” much more brutally than the easy-Aussie-speak of “iso” would convey. There is much less play—and a lot less mingling—in the Australian National Dictionary Centre description of new uses of the word “bubble”: “a district, region, or a group of people viewed as a closed system, isolating from other districts, regions, or groups as a public health measure to limit the spread of Covid-19”. There have been various kinds of “closed system[s]”, isolated groups and regions constructed in the management of the pandemic, but there is one group—and one kind of location—that has been “bubbled” in quite specific ways. While the sectioning off and isolating of older age people in the name of protecting their health has often been ineffectively—and in some places, disastrously—managed in terms of disease prevention, it has been very effective in reducing the rights and voices of those it acts in the name of. Speaking from Ireland but commenting on the situation in the UK and parts of Europe, Anne Fuchs and colleagues write that “the discursive homogenization and ‘frailing’ of the over 65s meant that people in this category were an object of public discourse rather than participants in the debate” (2). In many instances the “bubbling” of older people, particularly those in aged care residences, has served to both isolate and render largely voiceless the residents of these care homes. Although the global impact of COVID-19 on the aged has been significant, including across many affluent societies, it has been particularly disastrous in Australia. At the time of writing (1 January 2021), of the 909 COVID-related deaths in Australia to date, 693 have been of people aged 80 or over: in other words, more than 75% of COVID-related deaths in Australia have been of people over 80. According to the federal government’s records of COVID-19 deaths by age group and sex, 685 of these deaths have been of aged care residents. It is not surprising therefore that many speak of the heavy impact of COVID-19 on older people as a form of genocide. Public discourse and government policies and priorities around COVID-19 have thrown into relief and exacerbated some of the deeply troubling ways that older people, particularly those living in aged care residences, are not recognised or treated as “equal partners in our future” (Royal Commission into Aged Care 1). Both the management of and public discourse around COVID-19 have highlighted and escalated the forms of ageism, especially ageism around later life, that have become embedded in Australian culture. In late 2019 the Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety released its Interim Report, titled simply Neglect. In the Foreword, the commissioners write: the Australian community generally accepts that older people have earned the chance to enjoy their later years, after many decades of contribution and hard work. Yet the language of public discourse is not respectful towards older people. Rather, it is about burden, encumbrance, obligation and whether taxpayers can afford to pay for the dependence of older people. (Royal Commission into Aged Care 1) Written and released before the COVID-19 pandemic, the Interim Report highlighted the “fundamental fact that our aged care system essentially depersonalises older people” (Royal Commission into Aged Care 6) and identified many ways “the aged care system fails to meet the needs of our older, often very vulnerable, citizens” (Royal Commission into Aged Care 1). In 2020 we saw some of the effects of these failures in the often disastrous mismanagement of disease transmission prevention in many aged care residences in Australia. Equally troubling, the resulting deaths have at times been accompanied by a general acceptance of the loss of so many in later life to COVID-19. The fact that these deaths are often regarded as somehow more inevitable, or as less significant than the deaths of others, is an indication of how deeply “Australia has drifted into an ageist mindset that undervalues older people and limits their possibilities” (Royal Commission into Aged Care 1). It assumes that one’s later-life years are of less significance and value (to oneself, to the community) than one’s younger years. At various times in the pandemic, sizable parts of the global population have been variously asked, advised, or required by their governments to remain within their household or residential “bubble”. These COVID-related “bubbles” are more buoyant for some. Jackie Gulland has written a feminist analysis of the ways that the UK COVID-19 lockdown rules are premised on “neo-liberal assumptions about the family as autonomous and sufficient for the provision of reproductive labour” (330). In many places the requirement to stay within one’s “household bubble” both assumes that the home is safe for all, and that most care and dependency requirements are provided and received within a household. As Gulland’s essay demonstrates, the idea of the household bubble constructs an image or idea of who and what constitutes a household, and which relationships “count”. Drawing on critiques of neo-liberal and able-ist ideas about autonomy by feminist and disability scholars, Gulland “shows how the failure of policymakers to take account of interdependency has made lockdown more difficult for carers and those in receipt of care” (330). In this essay we look at some of the ways that the required and/or imagined COVID-19 bubbles for people in later life are thought of differently to the COVID-19 bubbles that younger, and mixed age, households are imagined as forming. This is particularly the case, we argue, for those in aged care residences. Younger and mixed age COVID bubbles often include extended or linked households (as we will discuss below in relation to the idea of the compassionate bubble) and function as a bubble that can link and enclose. In contrast, COVID bubbles in and for aged care and those in later life, work to isolate and separate. They function as bubbles that close off and shut out, as if placing the older person and older people behind glass (in some cases, quite literally). Likewise, while the COVID-19 bubbles for the “general” population (a category from which those in later life are often excluded) are regarded as temporary structures that will in time be dissolved to re-allow social movement and intermingling, the later life and aged care COVID-19 bubble is imagined very differently. This is because it is overlaid upon a pre-existing conception of later life—and in particular the fourth age—as itself a kind of bubbled existence, a fragile state held somewhat separate and apart from the general population and moving inexorably toward death—a bubble that pops. Bubbling the Fourth Age The idea that later life can be divided into different stages and ages has a long history, although the shape, meaning and valuing of different ages in later life is historically specific. Back in the late 1980s the Cambridge historian Peter Laslett proposed that rather than falling into three main stages—childhood, adulthood and old age—there are in fact four stages and that “later life can be divided into a ‘third age’ and a ‘fourth age’” (Gilleard and Higgs, “The Fourth Age” 368). Laslett’s distinction between a third age (active and characterised by personal fulfillment) and a fourth age (for Laslett an age of infirmity) has become increasingly significant in both age studies and in the provision and imagining of aged care. While the third age is increasingly depicted as something that, when managed “successfully”, can expand and fill with rich experiences and rewards (assuming one has the economic and social privilege and mobility to embrace these rich offerings—see Katz and McHugh cited in Zeilig, “Critical Use of Narrative”), the fourth age, on the other hand, is associated with frailty, increased dependence, vulnerability, precarity (see Lloyd; Gilleard and Higgs; and Morganroth Gullette on the fourth age). Of course, experiences of vulnerability, dependency and precarity run throughout the life course and cannot be reduced to chronological age. However, the distinction between a third and fourth age tends to assume that once one “leaves” the third age, it is a one-way path to “the three ‘Ds’: decrepitude, dependence, and death” (Laslett). The fourth age becomes associated with those aspects of ageing that are culturally rejected and pushed aside—in particular physical dependence which, as in much able-ist thinking, is rendered abject. As Morganroth Gullette has argued, a “savage contradiction” underlies and fuels this distinction, as “fantasies of the longevity bonanza proliferate alongside growing terrors of living too long” and becoming a “‘burden’” (21). In other words, those aspects of ageing—indeed those aspects of being human—that are seen as undesirable and/or abject are associated with the fourth age and imagined as somehow exclusive to it: they are placed elsewhere, contained in a fourth age “bubble”. The understanding of the fourth age as a kind of bubble is evident in and enabled by various kinds of cultural representations and institutional discourses around later life, including the kind of language used (particularly language connoting precarity and fragility and liminality) and recurrent media imagery in which people in their “fourth age” are depicted as mentally and physically out of reach (for instance isolated behind glass). Legislation around the movements of residents, visitors, and staff in aged care residence does not simply create “protective” bubbles around aged care residences but also constructs and imagines these residences and their inhabitants as “bubbled”, removed, and voiceless. Vulnerability, ephemerality, precarity and decline have become increasingly significant in representations of and discourses around ageing. Much of the media coverage of those in later life, particularly those living in aged care residences, has further fuelled what Sally Chivers has called the “nursing home specter” and delivered, in heightened and often spectacularised form, the “life-course narrative that dominant culture provides—an unliveable mind and unrecognizable body, mountainous expense” (Morganroth Gullette, 24). The discourse on ageing is characterised by the use of metaphor and metonymy, of which “the bubble” or “bubbling” is only one notable example. The culture of fear that surrounds the fourth age stems from the presumption that ageing inevitably leads to decay and decline in quality of life, and that the experience of ageing is characterised by various forms of physical and cognitive deterioration, such as dementia. Cultural gerontologist Hannah Zeilig has drawn attention to the pervasive use of metaphors—in both medical journals and mass media reports—to describe the experience of living with dementia. These metaphors attempt to capture and simplify the complexities of being, speaking, and knowing experienced by people with dementia. They are frequently used to communicate these experiences to people who do not live with dementia. The cultural metaphors of dementia are potent examples of ageism. They are not neutral in their connotations or implicit value judgements. These metaphors reveal wider social anxieties around ageing, despite the fact that people in their 40s and 50s can have dementia (Dementia Australia). As Zeilig has pointed out, many of these metaphors have presented a negative framing of dementia, describing the rising numbers of dementia diagnoses in apocalyptic, biblical terms such as “plague”, “crisis”, and “epidemic” (“Cultural Metaphor” 260). While this hyperbole may be grounded in statistics and the realities of an ageing population, it has nevertheless been alarming. This rhetoric has often been a necessary tactic for dementia organisations as part of their efforts to secure media coverage, raise public awareness of dementia, and lobby for increased government and private investment in funding research and support services. Despite these noble intentions, this rhetoric can risk excluding or marginalising the voices of people living with dementia. Some of the metaphors that have been used to describe dementia are particularly dehumanising and stigmatising, such as the perception of Alzheimer’s disease as a form of “living death”. This conception of Alzheimer’s, which Susan M. Behuniak has observed in both scholarly and popular discourse, elicits strong negative emotional responses of revulsion and fear. It constructs people with Alzheimer’s as abject zombie-like figures living a half-life or twilight existence. These trends in dementia discourse that Zeilig and Behuniak identified in the first half of the 2010s are also apparent in media imagery and discourse about older people in the COVID-19 pandemic. Much like the cultural narratives of dementia, these representations often reinforce the fourth age’s association with forms of vulnerability, decline and decay that are rendered abject. In contrast to this negative framing of both dementia and the fourth age, the trope of “living in a bubble” can also present a more ambivalent conception of both living with dementia and, by extension, the sociocultural experience of living in the fourth age during the time of COVID-19. “Bubbling” can serve a protective function for the person living with dementia by reducing sensory overload and cognitive confusion that may lead to anxiety and emotional distress. In dementia care, bubble wands and bubble wrap are two of the most commonly used tools in sensory therapy for reducing anxiety and agitation, and providing comfort (DailyCaring). These examples remind us of the materiality of the bubble, which functions as both cultural trope and material condition that affects people’s lives (to borrow from Helen Deutsch and Felicity Nussbaum, cited in Vivian Sobchack’s essay on metaphor and materiality). Within the diversity and range of caring practices encompassed by the trope of “bubbling”, there is clear potential for the bubble to be enabling, rather than disabling, if it is used to enhance quality of life and wellbeing for older people, rather than to separate, marginalise and isolate. Despite the multivalent possibilities of the bubble for enhancing quality of life for people with dementia, the bubble’s association with precarity has been heightened by its deployment to protect older people during the COVID-19 pandemic. This is a source of ambivalence around the COVID-19 bubble, a public health response that is acknowledged as having both protective and harmful effects. It involves “bubbling” older people, especially those living in residential care, by physically isolating them and limiting their contact with family and friends to conversations mediated by digital technology or a windowpane. By restricting physical and direct contact with the outside world in order to reduce and contain transmission of the virus, the COVID-19 bubble is intended to protect the physical health of older adults. But as Karra Harrington and Martin J. Sliwinski caution, this can also risk the cognitive health and mental wellbeing of older people by creating social isolation. These concerns about the negative health impacts of the COVID-19 bubble compound the existing popular understanding of late life as isolated and isolating, perpetuating the ageist assumptions that characterise the social imaginary around the fourth age. Creating Compassionate Bubbles The distress of separation caused by COVID-19 lockdowns and restrictions is felt by all generations, not just older people. Recognising the costs to our emotional and mental wellbeing of living in isolation to protect our bodies and our communities from viral invasion, Australian epidemiologist Mary-Louise McLaws has called for “a compassionate germ bubble”, modelled on New Zealand’s concept of an extended bubble that allows close contacts beyond one household. This alternative approach to “bubbling” is designed to strike a better balance between physical and mental health. Writing during Melbourne’s strict and prolonged lockdown following a second wave of cases in the winter of 2020, McLaws argued that “a compassionate germ bubble may foster resilience by reducing a sense of isolation for people living alone and friends, extended family and partners distressed by the separation”. There have been a number of creative and compassionate responses to the necessity of the COVID-19 bubble for protecting those most vulnerable to the virus. Aged care residences have developed innovative ways to safely maintain in-person visits and provide opportunities for face-to-face contact between residents and their families and friends. One example reported in the Australian media (Steger) is “The Window of Love” in Perth, which demonstrates the positive potential of the bubble—represented here as a pane of glass bordered by a painted frame—for facilitating social connection and supporting wellbeing despite restrictions on physical contact. The media reporting of these innovations tends to spectacularise the residents of these homes, reinforcing their fragility and vulnerability as they are framed behind plastic or glass. In December 2020, international media outlets The Guardian, RTE News, and Star Media posted a Reuters video story on their respective YouTube channels about a “hug bubble” created in an aged care home in Jeumont, France. This inflatable plastic tunnel allows physical touch between those living in the home and those outside it through hermetically sealed sleeves. Separating the resident from their visitors is a clear plastic sheet, which is disinfected by staff in between each visit. Recognising the importance of physical contact for wellbeing, nursing staff reported that the hug bubble has brought comfort to the residents, whose previous contact with family and friends since the outbreak of COVID-19 in March 2020 had been limited to video calls or talking through a window. Viewer comments reveal divergent responses to this media story across all three YouTube channels. Some viewers applaud the innovation while others disparage the hug bubble as “cruel” and “disgraceful”. Other comments register viewers’ ambivalence, recognising the good intentions behind the idea while despairing at the need for it. Several comments offer a snapshot of the cynical, often incoherent views about the pandemic commonly found on social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, while also demonstrating the persistence of ageist attitudes that regard the elderly as a burden. These negative responses are striking in contrast with the positive framing of the original media report, which is presented as a “feel good” human interest story through brief interviews with family members and nursing home staff, reflecting on the residents’ experiences using the hug bubble. This positive framing is reinforced by the gentle music track accompanying the video posted on the RTE News channel. Beyond the institutional context of aged care residences, many families and communities have also engineered solutions to reduce the stress of separation. Craving physical contact after months of isolation, they have embraced the materiality and tactility inherent in the bubble trope. People have improvised using household objects, such as plastic sleeves attached to transparent shower curtains, to build “cuddle curtains”, and “hug machines” to enable safe—and playful—physical contact. These innovations and adaptations tap into the bubble’s playful qualities, while also “going viral” as families document their creativity, delight and joy through their own video stories shared on YouTube. As we move into the second year of the COVID-19 pandemic, with case numbers and the death toll continuing to climb globally, the concept of the COVID-19 bubble and its role in protecting the community will continue to be debated, refined and reconfigured in both public health responses and media discourse. Despite Australia’s relatively good fortune in terms of total number of COVID-related deaths compared to other Western nations such as the US and the UK, the disproportionately high number of deaths among Australians in aged care is a sobering reminder of the systemic failures in Australia’s aged care residences. As we move in and out of periods of social isolation, restrictions and lockdowns, it will become increasingly important to address the mental health impacts of “living in a bubble” and to consider creative, compassionate alternatives that challenge ageism and maintain quality of life for fourth age Australians. *** As COVID-19 and its management continue to reshape our world(s) and our relations to each other, its impacts continue to be unevenly felt, particularly for those in later life. For this reason, it becomes increasingly important to be alert to the ways in which “bubbling” the fourth age in response to COVID-19 risks reinforcing a homogenising view of older people as vulnerable and isolated, defenceless against viral invasion and voiceless in expressing agency and maintaining social connection. This essay responds to Hannah Zeilig’s earlier call to “radically rethink the ways in which age and ageing have been culturally configured” (“Critical Use of Narrative” 16). One of the purposes of this essay has been to critically assess some of the ways that the relatively new discourse of a fourth age—as somehow both qualitatively and quantifiably different to and separate from the third age—entails a homogenising view of older people. This view has enabled forms of ageism that have often been particularly brutal in their impact during the pandemic. In this essay we have argued that popular conceptions of and public health discourse and policy around the fourth age have often enabled—or, at the very least, supported—forms of ageism. This ageism has been further heightened through both the discourse and the imagery of the COVID-19 bubble. The fourth age, we argued, has often been understood as bubble-like: as a “stage” of life when one is somehow separated from the larger community and culture. The fourth age is configured as physically fragile and precarious, transient and temporary, ephemeral, and enclosed in—and as—its own world. Created in the name of protecting “our most vulnerable”, the bubble in the time of COVID-19 has heightened these pre-existing social anxieties around the fourth age. The challenge, as we move into the second year of the pandemic in Australia, is to find new ways of protecting the health and wellbeing of people in later life, while creating opportunities for connection, agency and play that are supported, rather than hindered, by the COVID-19 bubble. References Australian National Dictionary Centre. “2020 Word of the Year.” Canberra: School of Literature, Languages and Linguistics, ANU College of Arts and Social Sciences, Australian National University. 17 Nov. 2020. 12 Jan. 2021 <https://slll.cass.anu.edu.au/centres/andc/news/2020-word-year>. Behuniak, Susan M. “The Living Dead? The Construction of People with Alzheimer’s Disease as Zombies.” Ageing & Society 21 (2011): 70–92. Chivers, Sally. “‘Blind People Don’t Run’: Escaping the ‘Nursing Home Specter’ in Children of Nature and Cloudburst.” Journal of Aging Studies 34 (2015): 134–41. “COVID-19 Deaths by Age Group and Sex.” Australian Government Department of Health: Coronovirus (COVID-19) Current Situation and Case Numbers. 1 Jan. 2021 <https://www.health.gov.au/news/health-alerts/novel-coronavirus-2019-ncov-health-alert/coronavirus-covid-19-current-situation-and-case-numbers#cases-and-deaths-by-age-and-sex>. DailyCaring. “6 Alzheimer’s Sensory Activities Reduce Anxiety without Medication.” 12 Jan. 2021 <https://dailycaring.com/6-alzheimers-sensory-activities-reduce-anxiety-without-medication/>. Dementia Australia. “What Is Dementia?” 12 Jan. 2021 <https://www.dementia.org.au/about-dementia/what-is-dementia>. Fuchs, Anne, Desmond O'Neill, Mary Cosgrove, and Julia Langbein. “Report on COVID-19 – Reframing Ageing Webinar 12 June 2020.” Preprint. Aug. 2020. DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.34508.44161. Gilleard, Chris, and Paul Higgs. “Aging without Agency: Theorizing the Fourth Age.” Aging and Mental Health 14.2 (2010): 121–28. Gilleard, Chris, and Paul Higgs. “Ageing Abjection and Embodiment in the Fourth Age.” Journal of Aging Studies 25.2 (2011): 135–42. Gilleard, Chris, and Paul Higgs. “The Fourth Age and the Concept of a ‘Social Imaginary’: A Theoretical Excursus.” Journal of Aging Studies 27 (2013): 368–76. Gulland, Jackie. “Households, Bubbles, and Hugging Grandparents: Caring and Lockdown Rules during COVID-19.” Feminist Legal Studies 28 (2020): 329–39. Harrington, Karra, and Martin J. Sliwinski. “The Loneliness of Social Isolation Can Affect Your Brain and Raise Dementia Risk in Older Adults.” The Conversation 4 Aug. 2020. 12 Jan. 2021 <https://theconversation.com/the-loneliness-of-social-isolation-can-affect-your-brain-and-raise-dementia-risk-in-older-adults-141752>. Laslett, Peter. A Fresh Map of Life: The Emergence of the Third Age. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1989. Lloyd, Liz. “The Fourth Age.” Routledge Handbook of Cultural Gerontology. Eds. Julia Twigg and Wendy Martin. London: Routledge, 2015. 20 Dec. 2020 <https://www.routledgehandbooks.com/doi/10.4324/9780203097090.ch33>. McLaws, Mary-Louise. “What Is the COVID ‘Bubble’ Concept, and Could It Work in Australia?” The Conversation 1 Sep. 2020. 12 Jan. 2021 <https://theconversation.com/what-is-the-covid-bubble-concept-and-could-it-work-in-australia-144938>. Morganroth Gullette, Margaret. “Aged by Culture.” Routledge Handbook of Cultural Gerontology. Eds. Julia Twigg and Wendy Martin. London: Routledge, 2015. 28 Dec. 2020 <https://www.routledgehandbooks.com/doi/10.4324/9780203097090.ch3>. Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety. Neglect. Interim Report Volume 1. Canberra: Commonwealth Government of Australia, 31 Oct. 2019. 12 Jan. 2021 <https://agedcare.royalcommission.gov.au/publications/interim-report>. Sobchack, Vivian. “A Leg to Stand On: Prosthetics, Metaphor, and Materiality.” In The Prosthetic Impulse: From a Posthuman Present to a Biocultural Future. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006. 17–41. Steger, Sarah. “Coronavirus Crisis: Oryx Communities Aged Care Home Creates ‘Window of Love’ to Help Residents Stay Connected to Families.” The West Australian 5 Apr. 2020. 12 Jan. 2021 <https://thewest.com.au/news/coronavirus/coronavirus-crisis-oryx-communities-aged-care-home-creates-window-of-love-to-help-residents-stay-connected-to-families-ng-b881510245z>. Zeilig, Hannah. “The Critical Use of Narrative and Literature in Gerontology.” International Journal of Ageing and Later Life 6.2 (2011): 7-37. ———. “Dementia as a Cultural Metaphor.” The Gerontologist 54.2 (2013): 258–67. ———. “What Do We Mean When We Talk about Dementia? Exploring Cultural Representations of ‘Dementia’.” Working with Older People 19.1 (2015): 12–20.

The Introduction surveys the divergent representations of babyhood in the nineteenth century. It situates the present study at the intersection of new work on the modern family and changing parenting realities, as well as historical childhood and child care. After a detailed discussion of the most influential or mainstream portrayals of infancy in Victorian popular culture, such as the sentimentalized baby, the baby as victim in social reform writing, and the commodified baby, the Introduction addresses the importance of unusual, yet culturally significant depictions, including comical or sensationalized babies in fiction. How did these portrayals transform cultural fantasies and genre developments? How did iconic depictions of babyhood reflect, distort, or endeavour to change the lived realities of young children in Victorian Britain? The texts selected for close reading in the subsequent chapters include material that reveals unexpected sides to Victorian infancy, as well as works that have had a catalysing function for changing representational strategies. Critical attention to the diverse and at times ambiguous depiction of infancy in Victorian culture thus also produces new readings of canonical works that have hitherto not been considered from this angle.

This chapter analyses the critical representation of changing baby care methods in Charlotte Yonge’s fiction to parse the growing awareness of competitive parenting advice in Victorian culture. As a religious novelist dedicated to producing realist accounts of family life, Yonge creates unidealized infant protagonists who exhibit realistically described, age-appropriate behaviour. While they demonstrate the effects of different childrearing methods, Yonge avoids producing model children or parents. Instead, she depicts baby care as demanding domestic work that is rendered more difficult by the growing onslaught of contrasting opinions. Whereas her early marriage novel Heartsease (1854) describes maternal involvement in the day-to-day care of the young heroine’s first-born with unprecedented detail, both The Daisy Chain (1856) and Nuttie’s Father (1885) highlight the difficulties of a ‘mother-sister.’ In asserting the superiority of domestic realism over sensationalism, moreover, Yonge rewrites popular infant impostor plots while drawing on child abduction cases in the press and, in her late novel That Stick (1892), critically tackles the notorious vilification of workhouse nurseries. This still seldom discussed domestic writer thus negotiates shifting attitudes to and representations of babies and baby care. Her comments on changing practices alert us to the competitive parenting prevalent in Victorian Britain, how such a sense of competition was fostered by divergent childrearing advice, how damaging this could be, and how it already began to attract critical remarks at the time.

I like to know how things work—why plaque piles up in arteries, how microbiologists identify different strains of bacteria, how surgeons separate conjoined twins, why some medical centers are better than others. I want to give people information that will help them make better medical decisions. The most exciting way to find these things out, and to inform the public, is by writing for popular magazines. Most magazine articles begin with a proposal, also called a query letter. For a piece I suggested to Child magazine, here's how I opened my proposal: . . . Eva Marie is an energetic 4-year-old beauty with big dark eyes, a shining pageboy haircut, and a hole in her heart. Yes, doctors said, the hole can be repaired, but the surgery will split open Eva's breastbone and leave a scar down the center of her small body. Eva Marie would spend three days in the pediatric intensive care unit and at least seven days in the hospital. How can you explain to a 4-year-old what major heart surgery means? Eva Marie's parents hoped to find a way to save her the pain, the scarring, and the lengthy recovery time. They were fortunate. Surgeons at New York University Medical Center who pioneered minimal-access heart surgery for adults are now using the technique to treat children's heart defects like the one Eva Marie was born with. . . . The editor liked the proposal and assigned me the story, which ran as the article “Gentle Repair for Tiny Hearts” in the August 2000 issue of Child. The major magazine markets for health and medical stories are general interest magazines, women's magazines, parenting magazines, health magazines, and science magazines. With a circulation of nearly 36 million and a readership of 80 million—nearly one-third of the nation—the granddaddy of general interest magazines is Parade. It is the Sunday magazine of 350 newspapers. Parade has a commitment to health coverage; it runs one major health story a month, plus a health column. It also features special issues on “Live Longer, Better, Wiser,” men's health, women's health, and issues keyed to important “disease weeks.”

A cohort study is one in which the outcome (usually disease status) is ascertained for groups of individuals defined on the basis of their exposure. At the time exposure status is determined, all must be free of the disease. All eligible participants are then followed up over time. Since exposure status is determined before the occurrence of the outcome, a cohort study can clarify the temporal sequence between exposure and outcome, with minimal information bias. The historical and the population cohort study (Box 9.1) are efficient variants of the classical cohort study described above, which nevertheless retain the essential components of the cohort study design. The exposure can be dichotomous [i.e. exposed (to obstetric complications at birth) vs. not exposed], or graded as degrees of exposure (e.g. no recent life events, one to two life events, three or more life events). The use of grades of exposure strengthens the results of a cohort study by supporting or refuting the hypothesis that the incidence of the disease increases with increasing exposure to the risk factor; a so-called dose–response relationship. The essential features of a cohort study are: ♦ participants are defined by their exposure status rather than by outcome (as in case–control design); ♦ it is a longitudinal design: exposure status must be ascertained before outcome is known. The classical cohort study In a classical cohort study participants are selected for study on the basis of a single exposure of interest. This might be exposure to a relatively rare occupational exposure, such as ionizing radiation (through working in the nuclear power industry). Care must be taken in selecting the unexposed cohort; perhaps those working in similar industries, but without any exposure to radiation. The outcome in this case might be leukaemia. All those in the exposed and unexposed cohorts would need to be free of leukaemia (hence ‘at risk’) on recruitment into the study. The two cohorts would then be followed up for (say) 10 years and rates at which they develop leukaemia compared directly. Classical cohort studies are rare in psychiatric epidemiology. This may be in part because this type of study is especially suited to occupational exposures, which have previously been relatively little studied as causes of mental illness. However, this may change as the high prevalence of mental disorders in the workplace and their negative impact upon productivity are increasingly recognized. The UK Gulf War Study could be taken as one rather unusual example of the genre (Unwin et al. 1999). Health outcomes, including mental health status, were compared between those who were deployed in the Persian Gulf War in 1990–91, those who were later deployed in Bosnia, and an ‘era control group’ who were serving at the time of the Gulf war but were not deployed. There are two main variations on this classical cohort study design: they are popular as they can, depending on circumstances, be more efficient than the classical cohort design. The population cohort study In the classical cohort study, participants are selected on the basis of exposure, and the hypothesis relates to the effect of this single exposure on a health outcome. However, a large cohort or panel of subjects are sometimes recruited and followed up, often over many years, to study multiple exposures and outcomes. No separate comparison group is required as the comparison group is generally an unexposed sub-group of the panel. Examples include the British Doctor's Study in which over 30,000 British doctors were followed up for over 20 years to study the effects of smoking and other exposures on health (Doll et al. 1994), and the Framingham Heart Study, in which residents of a town in Massachusetts, USA have been followed up for 50 years to study risk factors for coronary heart disease (Wolf et al. 1988). The Whitehall and Whitehall II studies in the UK (Fuhrer et al. 1999; Stansfeld et al. 2002) were based again on an occupationally defined cohort, and have led to important findings concerning workplace conditions and both physical and psychiatric morbidity. Birth cohort studies, in which everyone born within a certain chronological interval are recruited, are another example of this type of study. In birth cohorts, participants are commonly followed up at intervals of 5–10 years. Many recent panel studies in the UK and elsewhere have been funded on condition that investigators archive the data for public access, in order that the dataset might be more fully exploited by the wider academic community. Population cohort studies can test multiple hypotheses, and are far more common than any other type of cohort study. The scope of the study can readily be extended to include mental health outcomes. Thus, both the British Doctor's Study (Doll et al. 2000) and the Framingham Heart Study (Seshadri et al. 2002) have gone on to report on aetiological factors for dementia and Alzheimer's Disease as the cohorts passed into the age groups most at risk for these disorders. A variant of the population cohort study is one in which those who are prevalent cases of the outcome of interest at baseline are also followed up effectively as a separate cohort in order (a) to study the natural history of the disorder by estimating its maintenance (or recovery) rate, and (b) studying risk factors for maintenance (non-recovery) over the follow-up period (Prince et al. 1998). Historical cohort studies In the classical cohort study outcome is ascertained prospectively. Thus, new cases are ascertained over a follow-up period, after the exposure status has been determined. However, it is possible to ascertain both outcome and exposure retrospectively. This variant is referred to as a historical cohort study (Fig. 9.1). A good example is the work of David Barker in testing his low birth weight hypothesis (Barker et al. 1990; Hales et al. 1991). Barker hypothesized that risk for midlife vascular and endocrine disorders would be determined to some extent by the ‘programming’ of the hypothalamo-pituitary axis through foetal growth in utero. Thus ‘small for dates’ babies would have higher blood pressure levels in adult life, and greater risk for type II diabetes (through insulin resistance). A prospective cohort study would have recruited participants at birth, when exposure (birth weight) would be recorded. They would then be followed up over four or five decades to examine the effect of birth weight on the development of hypertension and type II diabetes. Barker took the more elegant (and feasible) approach of identifying hospitals in the UK where several decades previously birth records were meticulously recorded. He then traced the babies as adults (where they still lived in the same area) and measured directly their status with respect to outcome. The ‘prospective’ element of such studies is that exposure was recorded well before outcome even though both were ascertained retrospectively with respect to the timing of the study. The historical cohort study has also proved useful in psychiatric epidemiology where it has been used in particular to test the neurodevelopmental hypothesis for schizophrenia (Jones et al. 1994; Isohanni et al. 2001). Jones et al. studied associations between adult-onset schizophrenia and childhood sociodemographic, neurodevelopmental, cognitive, and behavioural factors in the UK 1946 birth cohort; 5362 people born in the week 3–9 March 1946, and followed up intermittently since then. Subsequent onsets of schizophrenia were identified in three ways: (a) routine data: cohort members were linked to the register of the Mental Health Enquiry for England in which mental health service contacts between 1974 and 1986 were recorded; (b) cohort data: hospital and GP contacts (and the reasons for these contacts) were routinely reported at the intermittent resurveys of the cohort; (c) all cohort participants identified as possible cases of schizophrenia were given a detailed clinical interview (Present State examination) at age 36. Milestones of motor development were reached later in cases than in non-cases, particularly walking. Cases also had more speech problems than had noncases. Low educational test scores at ages 8,11, and 15 years were a risk factor. A preference for solitary play at ages 4 and 6 years predicted schizophrenia. A health visitor's rating of the mother as having below average mothering skills and understanding of her child at age 4 years was a predictor of schizophrenia in that child. Jones concluded ‘differences between children destined to develop schizophrenia as adults and the general population were found across a range of developmental domains. As with some other adult illnesses, the origins of schizophrenia may be found in early life’. Jones' findings were largely confirmed in a very similar historical cohort study in Finland (Isohanni et al. 2001); a 31 year follow-up of the 1966 North Finland birth cohort (n = 12,058). Onsets of schizophrenia were ascertained from a national hospital discharge register. The ages at learning to stand, walk and become potty-trained were each related to subsequent incidence of schizophrenia and other psychoses. Earlier milestones reduced, and later milestones increased, the risk in a linear manner. These developmental effects were not seen for non-psychotic outcomes. The findings support hypotheses regarding psychosis as having a developmental dimension with precursors apparent in early life. There are many conveniences to this approach for the contemporary investigator. ♦ The exposure data has already been collected for you. ♦ The follow-up period has already elapsed. ♦ The design maintains the essential feature of the cohort study, namely that information bias with respect to the assessment of the exposure should not be a problem. ♦ As with the Barker hypothesis example, historical cohort studies are particularly useful for investigating associations across the life course, when there is a long latency between hypothesized exposure and outcome. Despite these important advantages, such retrospective studies are often limited by reliance on historical data that was collected routinely for other purposes; often these data will be inaccurate or incomplete. Also information about possible confounders, such as smoking or diet, may be inadequate.