Building friendship through a cross-cultural mentoring program

This paper examines the efficacy of a short-term mentoring program in building cross-cultural friendships between students at an Australian university. Using a quasi-experimental approach, our study found that the mentoring program (Local Aussie Mentoring Program—LAMP) increased cross-cultural interactions for mentees, but not for mentors. About 45% of both mentors and mentees wished to continue their relationship with mentoring partners after the completion of the mentoring requirements. Mentees spent significantly more time with cross-ethnic friends than did controls after the completion of LAMP. We examined whether multicultural aspects of personality, as measured by the Multicultural Personality Questionnaire (MPQ), would positively correlate with cross-cultural mentoring effectiveness and cross-cultural friendship interactions (the dependent variables). Multicultural personality aspects of mentors (as measured by the MPQ) had significant positive relationships with both mentee and mentor-rated mentoring measures. All mentor MPQ scales showed some significant but small and positive relationships, with mentor friendship items, particularly Open-mindedness, Cultural Empathy and Emotional Stability. We found a significant, positive relationship between mentee Cultural Empathy and Social Initiative with cross-cultural friendship. These results show some partial support for a positive relationship between MPQ scales and cross-ethnic friendships.     

The perinatal period, a window of opportunity for enhancing parent-infant communication: An approach to prevention

The perinatal period, broadly defined, encompasses the time frame from one year before to 18 to 24 months after the birth of the child. This period constitutes a window of opportunity through which parent-infant interaction may be reinforced, offering the possibility of decreasing the risk of family dysfunction. This review article clarifies the relationship between the enhancement of parent-infant interactions and the prevention of child abuse and neglect. It contains a detailed discussion of the capabilities of the newborn and places in perspective the difficulty experienced when parents who were themselves mistreated in childhood struggle to establish a system of communication with their own newborn children. The perinatal intervention program, a program intended to teach new parents the skills of interaction with their newborns, is described and placed into perspective with other perinatal programs which have been reported to be capable of augmenting the capacity for communication. The authors review the research data demonstrating the efficacy of these perinatal parent-infant programs. The paper concludes with a review of effective interventions, a discussion of what can be expected of each, and suggestions for the practical application of the programs during the perinatal period. The authors recognize that no program taken in isolation is sufficient; taken together they have the ability to improve parent-child relations, and they thus constitute a multifaceted approach to the prevention of child abuse and neglect.