Die koeël is deur die kerk. Die huweliksbootjie het gesink. Hy kry die bed en sy die tafel. Hoekom skei hulle en hoekom skei hulle nóú dat jy ’n volwasse kind is?

Jou ouers is besig om te skei of hulle is klaar geskei. Almal fokus op hulle, maar jy suffer ook. Volwasse kinders kry swáár wanneer hulle ouers skei. Net so swaar, indien nie swaarder as jong kinders nie.

’n Eerste in Afrikaans — ’n handleiding vol raad oor hoe om die sleg en gesukkel van ’n egskeiding te hanteer waar volwasse kinders van egskeiding (18 jaar en ouer) hulle eerstehandse ervaring, verwarring, onsekerheid, woede en hartseer deel wat begin die oomblik as Ma en Pa sê: dis verby.

Die slegte nuus? Die egskeiding sal altyd ’n wond wees. Die goeie nuus? Jy kan leer hoe om dit beter te hanteer en met tyd kan dit net ’n letsel word. Soos Gretha (26) sê: “Time makes all wounds bearable.”

Drawing on her own research as a psychologist and psychotherapist conducted over two years with interviews in real life situations the author provides an insight into the wedding experience from the mother's point of view and explores the complexities of family relationships that this rite of passage can expose. The book offers the reader the chance to follow several women from different cultural backgrounds through the time leading up to and beyond their child's wedding. It is structured around three pivotal stages of the wedding: the announcement of the engagement, the wedding preparations, and the big day itself. The analysis of these interviews forms the main part of the book. It follows the themes emerging from these interviews and explores them placing them in the context of thinking in analytic psychotherapy and family therapy. The book will not so much help readers to avoid wedding "stress", but rather help them to make sense of it.

During the long eighteenth century the moral and socio-political dimensions of family life and gender were hotly debated by intellectuals across Europe. John Millar, a Scottish law professor and philosopher, was a pioneer in making gendered and familial practice a critical parameter of cultural difference. His work was widely disseminated at home and abroad, translated into French and German and closely read by philosophers such as Denis Diderot and Johann Gottfried Herder. Taking Millar's writings as his basis, Nicholas B. Miller explores the role of the family in Scottish Enlightenment political thought and traces its wider resonances across the Enlightenment world. John Millar's organisation of cultural, gendered and social difference into a progressive narrative of authority relations provided the first extended world history of the family. Over five chapters that address the historical and comparative models developed by the thinker, Nicholas B. Miller examines contemporary responses and Enlightenment-era debates on polygamy, matriarchy, the Amazon legend, changes in national character and the possible futures of the family in commercial society. He traces how Enlightenment thinkers developed new standards of evidence and crafted new understandings of historical time in order to tackle the global diversity of family life and gender practice. By reconstituting these theories and discussions, Nicholas B. Miller uncovers hitherto unexplored aspects of the Scottish contribution to European debates on the role of the family in history, society and politics.

Through the use of in-depth qualitative interviews, Modern Day Mary Poppins: The Unintended Consequences of Nanny Work examines the experiences of and relationships between nannies and their employers. Laura Bunyan uncovers the depths of caring labor while exposing the complicated nature of the relationships formed in care work and their impact on work experiences. Modern Day Mary Poppins reveals that the hiring process for nannies, the personal relationships formed between families and nannies, and work experiences are not straightforward or one-dimensional. Bunyan sheds further light on the long-term implications of early gendered work experiences, and the ways they position women to perform precarious labor.

Child care environments have received extensive research attention by those interested in understanding how participating in nonparental child care might influence the children's development and learning. Throughout the United States (US Census Bureau, 2011) and Europe (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, 2006) a large number of young children are cared for outside of the home by non-parental adults. Young children's nonparental care is commonly referred to as ""child care," and is provided to children whose ages range from birth to 12 years of age. The provision of child care services has become an increasingly important part of early childhood education. In fact, the United Nations Children's Fund (2019) states that a large majority of children worldwide spend at least some of their week in child care, such arrangements include center care, family child care, in-home child care, relative child care, and supplemental child care. Child care researchers have been conducting studies to understand how participating in nonparental child care might influence the children's development and learning outcomes. There are more than enough child care studies to make numerous major inferences. For example, research outcomes show that child care quality seems to be more influential than either the kind of child care or age of admission in determining the children's development and learning. The adults' child care affects the quality in child care. In the environment adults who are caring for the children have the opportunity to effectively assume both nurturing and instructional roles to help young children cultivate their social and cognitive abilities. The teachers' effectiveness is related to their individual characteristics, such as formal education, specialized training, and the classroom environment. However, the majority of the studies show that both family and quality of child care have the most significant effects on the children's development and learning. Therefore, the concept of child care has heavily influenced modern views. Researchers, scholars, and educators are beginning to understand the current foundations based on theoretical frameworks that contribute to the purposes of the child care in the United States and Europe. The contents of the child care volume reflect the major shifts in the views of these early childhood researchers, scholars, and educators in relation to research outcomes on child care, its historical roots, the role of child care in early childhood education, and its relationship to theory, research, and practice.

Now revised, updated, and expanded, this groundbreaking guide for parents and professionals covers the legal, financial, and emotional realities of creating two happy and stable homes for children in the aftermath of a divorce, including custody arrangements, mediation, and more.
Can children flourish in any custody situation? If their parents read "Mom's House, Dad's House," the answer is a resounding yes. This unique ground-breaking classic, which has become "the" standard for two generations of parents, is again breaking new ground with examples, self-tests, checklists, and guidelines. This comprehensive guide looks anew at the needs of all concerned with even more creative options and commonsense advice, including:
- The map to a "decent divorce" and two happy homes; healing yourself and your children; the New Family Bill of Rights after separation.
- Helping your children with age-specific advice; explaining change, giving them continuity and security; restabilizing their sense of home and family; danger signals; five ways to evaluate your children's time.
- Negotiating Parental Agreements; legal do's and don'ts; time arrangements; custody types; attorneys; how to get ready for negotiations; when to use mediation; using "HIRT" test when an agreement is broken.
- Breaking away from "negative intimacy" with a difficult ex; how to talk to your former mate; steps to building a "businesslike" relationship as parents; how to avoid becoming the neighborhood "soap opera"
- Sidestepping destructive myths; making the emotions, "flashbacks," and heartbreak of separation or divorce work for you and your child.
- Handling long-distance parenting; managing the return of an absent parent, holidays, remarriage, life without another parent

Karen Tracy examines the identity-work of judges and attorneys in state supreme courts as they debated the legality of existing marriage laws. Exchanges in state appellate courts are juxtaposed with the talk that occurred between citizens and elected officials in legislative hearings considering whether to revise state marriage laws. The book's analysis spans ten years, beginning with the U.S. Supreme Court's overturning of sodomy laws in 2003 and ending in 2013 when the U.S. Supreme Court declared the federal government's Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) unconstitutional, and it particularly focuses on how social change was accomplished through and reflected in these law-making and law-interpreting discourses. Focal materials are the eight cases about same-sex marriage and civil unions that were argued in state supreme courts between 2005 and 2009, and six of a larger number of hearings that occurred in state judicial committees considering bills regarding who should be able to marry. Tracy concludes with analysis of the 2011 Senate Judiciary Committee Hearing on DOMA, comparing it to the initial 1996 hearing and to the 2013 Supreme Court oral argument about it. The book shows that social change occurred as the public discourse that treated sexual orientation as a "lifestyle " was replaced with a public discourse of gays and lesbians as a legitimate category of citizen.

In recent years, the media has attributed the surge of people eagerly studying family trees to the aging of baby boomers, a sense of mortality, a proliferation of internet genealogy sites, and a growing pride in ethnicity. New genealogy-themed television series and internet-driven genetic ancestry testing services have also flourished, capitalizing on this new popularity and on the mapping of the human genome. But what's really happening here, and what does this mean for sometimes volatile conceptions of race and ethnicity? In Alternate Roots, Christine Scodari engages with genealogical texts and practices, such as the classic television miniseries Roots, DNA testing for genetic ancestry, Ancestry.com, and genealogy-related television series, including those shows hosted by Henry Louis Gates Jr. She lays out how family historians can understand intersections and historical and ongoing relations of power related to the ethnicity, race, class, and/or gender of their ancestors as well as to members of other groups. Perspectives on hybridity and intersectionality make connections not only between and among identities, but also between local findings and broader contexts that might, given only cursory attention, seem tangential to chronicling a family history. Given the genealogy-related media institutions, tools, texts, practices, and technologies currently available, Scodari's study probes the viability of a critical genealogy based upon race, ethnicity, and intersectional identities. She delves into the implications of adoption, orientation, and migration while also investigating her own Italian and Italian American ancestry, examining the racial, ethnic experiences of her forebears and positioning them within larger contexts. Filling gaps in the research on genealogical media in relation to race and ethnicity, Scodari mobilizes cultural studies, media studies, and her own genealogical practices in a critical pursuit to interrogate key issues bound up in the creation of family history.

The first decades of the twenty-first century have been beset by troubling social realities: coalition warfare, global terrorism and financial crisis, climate change, epidemics of family violence, violence toward women, addiction, neo-colonialism, continuing racial and religious conflict. While traumas involving large-scale or historical violence are widely represented in trauma theory, familial trauma is still largely considered a private matter, associated with personal failure. This book contributes to the emerging field of feminist trauma theory by bringing focus to works that contest this tendency, offering new understandings of the significance of the literary testimony and its relationship to broader society. The Poetics of Transgenerational Trauma adopts an interdisciplinary approach in examining how the literary testimony of familial transgenerational trauma, with its affective and relational contagion, illuminates transmissive cycles of trauma that have consequences across cultures and generations. It offers bold and insightful readings of works that explore those consequences in story-Alison Bechdel's Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (2006), Helene Cixous's Hyperdream (2009), Marguerite Duras's The Lover (1992), Pat Barker's Regeneration Trilogy (1999), and Alexis Wright's Carpentaria (2006) and The Swan Book (2013), concluding that such testimony constitutes a fundamentally feminist experiment and encounter. The Poetics of Transgenerational Trauma challenges the casting of familial trauma in ahistorical terms, and affirms both trauma and writing as social forces of political import.

Combining paid work with caring for children has become more difficult for families as women's working hours have increased. Over the past decade the issue of work-family balance has reached a more prominent place on the policy agenda of many Western European countries. However the preoccupations of governments have been largely instrumental, focusing particularly on the goal of increasing female employment rates in order to achieve greater competitiveness and economic growth, and also in many countries on raising fertility rates and promoting children's early learning. This important book looks at the three main components of work-family policy packages - childcare services, flexible working patterns and entitlements to leave from work in order to care - across EU15 Member States, with comparative reference to the US. It also provides an in-depth examination of developments in the UK. Variations in national priorities, policy instruments, established policy orientations and the context for policy making in terms of employment patterns, fertility behaviour and attitudes towards work and care are highlighted. Gender inequalities in the division of paid and unpaid work underpin the whole issue of work-family balance. But what constitutes gender equality in this crucial policy field? Jane Lewis argues that in spite of growing political emphasis on the importance of 'choice', a 'real' choice to engage in either or both the socially necessary activities of paid and unpaid work has remained elusive. Work-Family Balance, Gender and Policy is essential reading for students and scholars who wish to understand the complex challenges facing families and family policy and the opportunities for the future.

This book recognizes that intense public battles are being waged in the U.S. over the rights of LGB people to form legally and culturally recognized families. Their families are under a kind of sociopolitical scrutiny at this historical moment that compels us all to take stock of our strategies of family-building and, more broadly, the meaning of family in the U.S. today. Through in-depth, open-ended, qualitative interviews with 61 self-identified lesbian, gay, and bisexual people regarding how they came to have children or remain childless/childfree, this book reveals the challenges posed by homophobia and discrimination and showcases the creative strategies, resilience, and resourcefulness of lesbians, bisexuals, and gays as they build families (with or without children) after coming out. From descriptions of how the early process of coming out affected the desire to parent or remain childfree, to stories about the impact of homophobia and discrimination on the decision-making process, to the dynamics within couples that lead to becoming parents or remaining childfree, to examining how cultural notions of the strength of biology are employed when having children, to accounts of how the closet can be used strategically when bringing children into a family, their voices form the heart of this book. In a sociopolitical context in which gay, lesbian, and bisexual people often have to struggle to access the array of rights and opportunities that are afforded to most heterosexual people without question, addressing the questions raised in this book is an urgent and necessary endeavor.