The Robert S. and Grace W. Stone Primary Prevention Initiatives Grant Program, Empowering Children for Life, was established at the Wellesley Centers for Women (WCW) in 2003. This program provided support for research and evaluation that advance understanding the role of relationships in fostering child and adolescent welbeing and healthy human development. Researchers from across the country were invited to submit proposals for funding to support dissertation research or larger research projects.
Twenty-two years ago, Peggy McIntosh founded a teacher professional development project to work for gender equity in schools. She thought of it as an experiment in faculty-led faculty development – empowering teachers to work within their own schools, and within themselves, for change.
One hot August afternoon in 1999, after the day’s cooking and cleaning were done, I asked some of the young women of Miraflores, a Dominican village I studied for my dissertation, to talk with me about how their lives had changed since so many of their friends and neighbors began migrating to the United States. Mirafloreños have been moving to Boston since the early 1970s, settling in and around the neighborhoods of Dorchester, Roxbury, and Jamaica Plain. By the mid-1990s, nearly three-quarters of its households had family members living in Massachusetts. Close to 60 percent received some monthly income support from migrants. It seemed to me that the exchanges of people, money, goods, and what I call social remittances or ideas, practices, social capital, and identities that circulate regularly between people who move and people who stay behind had dramatically transformed aspects of daily life. In particular, I wanted to know how women’s lives had changed.
Researchers at the Wellesley Centers for Women (WCW), as part of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development (SECCYD), have followed more than 1,000 children born in 1991. These are the children known as Generation Y – those born of the Baby Boom between 1981-1995. Earlier reports on this study have focused on child care and children’s early development. But these babies are growing up! This article reviews what researchers have learned about the youths’ experiences through sixth grade.
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