In "Families" Jane Howard informally visits many dozens of families and tries to discover what makes the best ones work so well. Families are not dying, she finds, although they are evolving in various ways. From the tightest-knit nuclear family or extended clan to the most fragile new commune, the family in one guise or another remains everybody's most basic hold on reality. We may run away from our families as many do, but no sooner do we escape than we find another one, often very much like it. Sympathetically, with immense thrust, she crosses the continent to discover families' myths, jokes, and rituals. She leafs through their scrapbooks, sits on their porches, and takes part, when she can, in their feasts and celebrations. She talks to a father of eighteen, several double first cousins, stepchildren, multiple godmothers, an honorary relative of an Indian tribe, and a nine-year-old boy who has no family but his mother. She sits with a matriarch on the front stoop of a ghetto house, goes camping with a family in Mexico, has Thanksgiving with another in Iowa, and orders pizza with a Greek clan in Massachusetts. Howard reports on visits to conventional Southern and Jewish households and to innovative ones whose members, lacking a common history, plan on building common futures as if water were after all as thick as blood. She examines the notion that "there are ways and ways of achieving kinship, of which birth and marriage are only the most obvious." Millions of clans and families all over the United States continue to celebrate, quarrel, disband, reunite, and endure. Jane Howard makes us realize how our lives are interwoven both with the families we are born into and with those we invent as we go through life. "Families" is compassionate, provocative, and profound. The paperback edition of this important work will be essential reading for all those with an interest in the study of familial bonds, particularly sociologists, anthropologists, and psychologists.

'The best piece of nature writing since H is for Hawk, and the most powerful work of biography I have read in years' Neil Gaiman 'Wonderful - I can't recommend it too highly' Helen Macdonald 'One of those rare, enchanted books' Isabella Tree 'Beautiful - it made me cry' Simon Amstell 'I was entranced' Cathy Rentzenbrink This is a story about birds and fathers. About the young magpie that fell from its nest in a Bermondsey junkyard into Charlie Gilmour's life - and swiftly changed it. Demanding worms around the clock, riffling through his wallet, sharing his baths and roosting in his hair... About the jackdaw kept at a Cornish stately home by Heathcote Williams, anarchist, poet, magician, stealer of Christmas, and Charlie's biological father who vanished from his life in the dead of night. It is a story about repetition across generations and birds that run in the blood; about a terror of repeating the sins of the father and a desire to build a nest of one's own. It is a story about change - from wild to tame; from sanity to madness; from life to death to birth; from freedom to captivity and back again, via an insane asylum, a prison and a magpie's nest. And ultimately, it is the story of a love affair between a man and a magpie.

Originally published in 1969, based on the talks R. D. Laing gave in 1967 and 68, this book was intended by the author to evoke questions rather than provide answers. Using concepts of schizophrenia, R.D. Laing demonstrates that we tend to invalidate the subjective and experiential and accept the proper societal view of what should occur within the family.

Lesbian Step Families: An Ethnography of Love explores five lesbian step families'definitions of the step parent role and how they accomplish parenting tasks, cope with homophobia, and define and interpret their experiences. An intensive feminist qualitative study, the book offers guidelines for counselors and lesbian step families for creating healthy, functioning family structures and environments. It is the first book to concentrate exclusively on lesbian step families rather than on lesbian mothering in general.In Lesbian Step Families: An Ethnography of Love, you'll explore in detail the different kinds of step relationships that are developed and what factors may lead to the different types of step mothering in lesbian step families. The book helps you understand these relationships and parent roles through in-depth discussions of: how a step mother and legal mother who live together negotiate and organize parenting and homemaking tasks how members of lesbian step families define and create the step mother role strategies family members use to define and cope with oppression how sexism is transmitted within the family and how mothering may limit and/or contribute to female liberation the opinions and viewpoints of the children of these families The findings in Lesbian Step Families: An Ethnography of Love challenge traditional views of mothering and fathering as gender and biologically based activities; they indicate that lesbian step families model gender flexibility and that the mothers and step mothers share parenting--both traditional mothering and fathering--tasks. This allows the biological mother some freedom from motherhood as well as support in it. With insight such as this, you will be prepared to help a client, a loved one, or yourself develop and maintain healthy family relationships.

Foundations of Family Resource Management uses the lenses of consumer science, management, and economics, and beyond to help students make intelligent decisions about resources, time, and energies at the individual and family level. It has a strong interdisciplinary, global, and multicultural focus. This sixth edition brings in new material on millennials, delayed marriage, household composition, neuroscience, behavioral economics, sustainable consumption, technology, and handling crises. It has been updated in line with the latest census data and academic literature. The text contains lots of features to support student learning, including chapter summaries, "Did You Know?" questions, glossary of key terms, examples and cases, critical thinking activities, and review questions for discussion and reflection. Lecture slides and an instructor manual are available as digital supplements. This textbook meets the standards and criteria for the Certified Family Life Educator (CFLE) designation of the National Council on Family Relations (NCFR) and will be suitable for resource management courses in family and consumer science, human ecology, and human environmental science programs.

The problems of studying families arise from the difficulty in studying systems where there are multiple elements interacting with each other and with the child. How should this system be described? Still other problems relate to indirect effects; namely the influence of a particular dyad's interaction on the child when the child is not a member of the dyad. While all agree that the mother-father relationship has important bearing on the child's development, exactly how to study this--especially using observational techniques--remains a problem. While progress in studying the family has been slow, there is no question that an increase in interest in the family systems, as opposed to the mother-child relationship, is taking place. This has resulted in an increase in research on families and their effects.
This volume, by leading figures in child development on families, attests to the growing sophistication of the conceptualization and measurement techniques for getting at family processes. The third in a series that aims to address topics relevant to the developmental problems and developmental disabilities of retardation, this volume is divided into two parts. Section 1 presents basic family processes and approaches for describing family dynamics. It deals with these issues from a broad perspective, including studying families at dinner, families in different cultural contexts, and the understanding of family in nonhuman primates. Section 2 looks at family processes in the service of studying families at-risk. The risk factors include poverty, malnutrition, and developmental delay and retardation. The study of family processes in these contexts provides data on family dynamics as well as how these dynamics impact on the children's developing competence. This volume will be informative for researchers, clinicians, and educators from a variety of disciplines and settings. The editors' aim is to bring a greater clarity to issues concerning the family life of children and highlight new research and possibilities for intervention.

It is a truism among therapists in most mental health disciplines that the most important aspects of clinical practice are learned only after one has left graduate school and entered "the real world." While many of the basics could be covered in graduate school, supervisors of new therapists often feel that the fundamentals are only addressed in detail after a therapist has been employed. In response to this predicament, Odell and Campbell offer The Practical Practice of Marriage and Family Therapy: Things My Training Supervisor Never Told Me as a useful daily guide for graduate students and beginning marriage and family therapists that will ease the transition from learner to practicing professional in the clinical domain.Written in a refreshing and unpretentious style, much the way a caring seasoned professional would mentor a novice practitioner, The Practical Practice of Marriage and Family Therapy covers the major areas that typical graduate programs don t have time to address, including how to: integrate theoretical training with pragmatic clinical practice to maximize therapeutic effectiveness face the practical problems involving the financial elements of clinical work become a thoroughly credentialed professional develop an approach to becoming specialized uncover the motivation for being a professional marriage and family therapist increase one 's ability to maintain high-level practice over a lifetime of work by developing coping strategies and methods of safeguarding one 's own mental healthAddressing the unique approach of their book, Odell and Campbell explain, "Whereas most texts are handbooks on the actual theories and techniques used with couples and families, this book is designed to be a guide to the beginning professional as s/he leaves the graduate training environment and enters the mental health field as it exists in contemporary America. Our hope is that this book would be one of those chosen by the novice practicing professional if s/he could only take two or three with them into the field, as it contains material that is most useful for everyday work in clinical settings."

The family is a fundamental and complex component of all human societies. Primarily concerned with the organization and regulation of sexual relations and procreation, it is also an organizer of economic production, social division of labour, and the distribution of property, as well as the socialization of children and the care of the elderly or disadvantaged. The family as an institution lies at the intersection of nature and culture, because it is fundamentally concerned with certain elementary biological functions (birth and death), and is a major vehicle for the transfer of culture. It is also part of the apparatus of social control in human societies. Scholarly definitions and theories of the family are correspondingly complex and controversial. The works selected here form a cross-section of the landmarks in this developing field in the 19th and early-20th centuries. This collection traces the sociology of the family from its origins in the anthropological study of kinship in the late-19th century; includes examples of early-20th-century studies on family relations, which propose practical solutions to the problems of domestic breakdown and violence and the emergence of the

Friendships are crucial to children's well-being and happiness and lay important foundations upon which later relationships in adolescence and adulthood are built. This overview of the nature and significance of children's peer relationships examines issues such as social-cognitive development; the context of children's relationships; relationship problems such as loneliness; shyness and social isolation; and methods of promoting positive relationships.

The Victorian debate on marriage, motherhood and women's rights to an independent life reflects the impact the women's movement had on the formation and transformation of public opinion. The marriage debate was also about the New Woman, the "fin-de-siecle" representation of the feminist. This anthology contextualizes key feminist texts and ideas by connecting them to the public response they received. The first volume focuses on Mona Caird's "The Morality of Marriage" and the widespread controversy it provoked. The second volume widens the debate between feminists, traditionalists and anti-feminists by linking the public discourse on marriage and divorce to the controversy of the New Woman, a debate initiated and sustained by Sarah Grand's writings. The third and fourth volumes are concerned with New Woman fiction, providing selected reading from feminist and anti-feminist works, and reproducing the media debate on morality in literature. The fiction is taken from the writings of: Emma Brooke, Mona Caird, Gertrude Dix, Lady Florence Dixie, Emma Hepworth Dixon and George Egerton.

This edited volume discusses and analyses the impact of neoliberal policies and ideologies on public and private care practices in Nordic, Central, and East European welfare states. Through new conceptualizations of care practices, chapters take the reader directly into the homes, workplaces, and everyday life of urban and rural residents throughout Europe. The book argues that common neoliberal responses to care crises are not about revaluing care but rather a normalization of precarious work as expressed in moving care from public institutions to families within private homes. Featuring contributions from eight countries, chapters contribute to research on gender, care, migration, and welfare policies by discussing how recent developments in global capitalism and neoliberal policies influence welfare policies and care arrangements in post-egalitarian and post-socialist societies in Europe.

First published in 1998. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

First published in 1998. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

First published in 1998. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The International Library of Sociology (ILS) is the most important series of books on sociology ever published. Founded in the 1940s by Karl Mannheim, the series became the forum for pioneering research and theory, marked by comparative approaches and analysis of new disciplines, such as the sociology of youth and culture. Spanning volumes by Parsons, Dickinson and Ossowski, the history of the ILS is the history of modern sociology.

First Published in 1998. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

First Published in 1998. This is Volume III of eight in the Sociology of the Soviet Union series. Written in 1949, this is a collection of translated essays and documents about the family in the USSR and the changing attitudes prevailing in Soviet Russia towards specific aspects of social and political life.

It is a truism among therapists in most mental health disciplines that the most important aspects of clinical practice are learned only after one has left graduate school and entered "the real world." While many of the basics could be covered in graduate school, supervisors of new therapists often feel that the fundamentals are only addressed in detail after a therapist has been employed. In response to this predicament, Odell and Campbell offer The Practical Practice of Marriage and Family Therapy: Things My Training Supervisor Never Told Me as a useful daily guide for graduate students and beginning marriage and family therapists that will ease the transition from learner to practicing professional in the clinical domain.Written in a refreshing and unpretentious style, much the way a caring seasoned professional would mentor a novice practitioner, The Practical Practice of Marriage and Family Therapy covers the major areas that typical graduate programs don't have time to address, including how to: integrate theoretical training with pragmatic clinical practice to maximize therapeutic effectiveness face the practical problems involving the financial elements of clinical work become a thoroughly credentialed professional develop an approach to becoming specialized uncover the motivation for being a professional marriage and family therapist increase one's ability to maintain high-level practice over a lifetime of work by developing coping strategies and methods of safeguarding one's own mental healthAddressing the unique approach of their book, Odell and Campbell explain, "Whereas most texts are handbooks on the actual theories and techniques used with couples and families, this book is designed to be a guide to the beginning professional as s/he leaves the graduate training environment and enters the mental health field as it exists in contemporary America. Our hope is that this book would be one of those chosen by the novice practicing professional if s/he could only take two or three with them into the field, as it contains material that is most useful for everyday work in clinical settings."

You often see books on theoretical approaches and new interventions in therapy, but you rarely, if ever, find a book where therapists discuss their personal reactions to and views of the therapy they offer. In this amazing volume, Tales from Family Therapy: Life-Changing Clinical Experiences, psychologists, psychotherapists, and marriage and family counselors come together to share their unique experiences in therapy sessions and how they?ve learned that often the clients know more than they do As you will see, and as these therapists reveal, sometimes all the top-notch and most innovative theories in the world won?t help a client in distress.Tales from Family Therapy isn?t just about therapists learning a lesson or two from their clients. It's about compassion, healing, being taken by surprise, thinking on your toes, and encouraging people to believe in their strengths--not just their weaknesses. These stories represent to the authors some of the most special, most rewarding, and most puzzling moments in all their years of therapy. They invite you to share in their recollections and discussions of: the power of speaking accepting, respecting, and working with the realities clients bring the importance of first impressions in counseling how personal narratives develop through relationship coloring outside the lines of the dominant culture helping clients determine when rocking the boat is needed listening to your clients and not just your theories developing the self-of-therapist In the therapy room anything can happen, and as Tales from Family Therapy shows, anything does. Graduate students, counselors, licensed therapists, family educators, and family sciences professionals, as well as lay readers, will find this insightful book a helpful forum where the struggles, doubts, and triumphs of psychotherapy are revealed to encourage and inspire those who participate in the therapeutic process.

In the context of the ongoing de-standardization of young people's lives, this book explores changing patterns of household formation amongst contemporary 20-somethings and the implications of these changes for the ways in which they relate to friends, parents and partners. The book points to the growing polarization between the experiences of graduates and non-graduates, and highlights changing expectations and attitudes towards intimacy and "settling down" amongst these groups.

This cutting-edge edited collection examines the impact of political and social change upon the modern German family. By analysing different family structures, gender roles, social class aspects and children's socialization, The Family in Modern Germany provides a comprehensive and well-balanced overview of how different political systems have shaped modern conceptualizations of the family, from the bourgeois family ideal right up to recent trends like cohabitation and same-sex couples. Beginning with an overview of the 19th-century family, each chapter goes on to examine changes in family type, size and structure across the different decades of the 20th century, with a focus on the relationship between the family and the state, as well as the impact of family policies and laws on the German family. Lisa Pine and her expert team of contributors draw on a wealth of primary sources, including legal documents, diaries, letters and interviews, and the most up-to-date secondary literature to shed new light on the continuities and changes in the history of the family in modern and contemporary Germany. This book is a fantastic resource for scholars, postgraduates and advanced undergraduates studying modern German history, sociology and social policy.

Describes what being a foster mom is really like, the effects of foster care on the whole family, and how the foster care system fails severely abused children. Foster children are society's throwaway kids, the children no one wants-until someone finally does. Saving Michael provides an inside look Keri Vellis' struggle to secure the best possible services for two severely abused and traumatized siblings. Some doors opened, but too many closed during her ten-year journey as the voice for children in her care who have no voice of their own within the current system. Readers get a glimpse of Keri and her family's day-to-day life as she went from mother of three to adoptive mother of three more children and then the temporary caregiver of another seventeen. Saving Michael delves into issues bigger than one family's experiences and determination. Now an author and child advocate, Vellis provides a profoundly personal look into what it takes to get the best for each of the children she's had in her care. Her journey started from the first day of her first foster care situation and the urgent need for diagnoses and treatment. It continued despite the many obstacles thrown in her path to securing services for the vulnerable children in her family's care. Along the way, she details the many ups and downs, challenges and triumphs, her whole family experienced as part of the foster care system. All children deserve permanent, safe homes. The effort to obtain those for every child is a tremendous one not for the faint-hearted. But the rewards reverberate for everyone when it works. Follow Keri and her family on this heartfelt journey of love and persistence.

Economic analysis of the family is a recent, but already well-established area in economics. Economists have developed new methods to analyze decisions such as marriage, childbearing, divorce and the use of family resources. The economic approach has become crucial for design and understanding in many policy areas of current interest in modern societies, such as family, tax, social security and gender equality policies. The text bears evidence to the lively and relevant research in the area. The first part provides a picture of the state of the art of economics of the family as it relates to economic theory and economic modelling, examining the developments from common preference family models to the more recent co-operative or non co-operative bargaining models. The second part explores theoretical and empirical applications: the effect of the intrafamily distribution of income on family decisions; the interaction between marriage markets and labour markets; and the factors behind the rise of single parent families. The final part of the book focuses on family policies and analyzes tax, public child care and parental leave policy.

In this introduction to family studies, Jon Bernardes argues that variation and diversity are increasingly the hallmarks of family structure particularly in Europe and the United States. The book provides a comprehensive account of how families work both internally and in relation to society through the labour market and also through social institutions like education and the law.
The chapters are designed to work as individual units of study in courses on family living. Each chapter:
* highlights key issues
* summarises the most relevant research in the area
* suggests activities as a basis for student projects and discussion
* recommends further reading
Above all, this very positive approach to a changing social form encourages students to find out for themselves what family life, in all its richness and complexity, looks like as we enter the twenty first century.

eBook available with sample pages: 0203132084

In this introduction to family studies, Jon Bernardes argues that variation and diversity are increasingly the hallmarks of family structure particularly in Europe and the United States. The book provides a comprehensive account of how families work both internally and in relation to society through the labor market and also through social institutions like education and the law. The chapters are designed to work as individual units of study in a course on the family. Each chapter highlights key issues, summarises the most relevant research in the area, suggests activities as a basis for student projects and discussion, and recommends further reading. Above all, this very positive approach to a changing social form encourages students to find out for themselves what the family, in all its richness and complexity, looks like as we enter the twenty first century.