Appropriate as supplemental reading for courses in Social Policy and Social Studies that examine the role of parenting in society. The subject of lone mothers is a controversial and highly topical social and political issue. This unique core text examines the key issues in the debate, and assesses their impact on the UK and other countries in a comprehensive and accessible way. Broad in scope, it covers a wide range of issues including gender roles, the relationship of the family and the state, and the relationship between social policy and labour market policy.

"Adoption, Race, and Identity" is a long-range study of the impact of interracial adoption on those adopted and their families. Initiated in 1972, it was continued in 1979, 1984, and 1991. Cumulatively, these four phases trace the subjects from early childhood into young adulthood. This is the only extended study of this controversial subject.

Simon and Altstein provide a broad perspective of the impact of transracial adoption and include profiles of the families involved in the study. They explore and compare the experiences of both the parents and the children. They identify families whose adoption experiences were problematic and those whose experiences were positive. Finally, the study looks at the insights the experience of transracial adoption brought to the adoptive parents and what advice they would pass on to future parents adopting children from different racial backgrounds. They include the reflections of those adopted included in the 1972 first phase, who are now adults themselves.

This second edition includes a new concluding chapter that updates the fourth and last phase of the study. The authors were able to locate 88 of the 96 families who participated in the 1984 study. Bringing together all four phases of this twenty-year study into one volume gives the reader a richer and deeper understanding of what the experience of transracial adoption has meant for the parents, the adoptees, and children born into the families studied. This landmark work, will be of compelling interest to social workers, policy makers, and professionals and families involved on all sides of interracial adoption.

Published in 1998, this book brings together some of the key findings in parenting and educational programmes from researchers at the University of Oxford, working in primary health care, educational studies, clinical psychology and applied social studies. At a time of considerable changes in family life and society in general, there is concern that some children are not achieving their potential because of emotional and behavioural difficulties. This book looks across the health, education and social divide and highlights what we know and what we don't know about effective strategies in helping children and their parents overcome their difficulties. Each chapter is written by a different member of the centre at Oxford for Research into Parenting and Children and is based on their research.

Originally published in 1987, this book shows that there is still considerable continuity in the practices and ideas of marriage in Afican against a background of social and economic change. This book discusses the diverse marriage forms in Africa and explores the different systems some of which can be understood in terms of Levi-Strauss's distinciton between complex and semi-complex structures, while others throw up questions of filiation, child custoidanship and rights secured through bridewealth transactions.

Originally published in 1958, this book discusses how marriage and Fulbe family life, the economy and the whole organization of society is centred on cattle; how the welfare of the herd and its increase, the balance betweent he size of the herd and the size of the family are major preoccupations in the life of a Fulani herd-owner.

The Family System Test (FAST), developed by Thomas M. Gehring, is an important new tool for investigating family relations. Based on the structural-systemic theory of families, it is a figural technique for representing emotional bonds (cohesion) and hierarchical structures in the family or similar social systems. In this unique volume, the editors draw on current theory and research in family or similar social systems together with a variety of empirical studies that have used the FAST, to provide a comprehensive overview and assessment of the test and its use in various clinical research contexts.
The book is divided into four sections, each focusing on a different aspect of the FAST. Part 1 describes the concepts and psychometric properties of the FAST within the context of theoretically and empirically relevant aspects of the field of family psychology as a whole. Special emphasis is given to systematic-structural approaches to assessing individual and family functioning. Part II focuses on the use of the FAST in developmental research. For example, the the FAST has been used to show how family constructs are influenced by age, type of family and situation. Part III deals with cross-cultural issues and compares the interpersonal constructs of Japanese and Chinese families to Western families. Finally, Part IV addresses the applications of the FAST in clinical setting - in diagnosis of biopsychosocial problems and planning and evaluation of clinical interventions.
The result is a book that helps to bridge the gap between theory, practice and research. It will be essential reading for users of the FAST and all clinicians and researchers who work in family relations and development.

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Why have the minutiae of how parents raise their children become routine sources of public debate and policy making? This book provides in-depth answers to these features drawing on a wide range of sources from sociology, history, anthropology and psychology, covering developments in both Europe and North America.

First published in 1998, this volume explores the connections between the rises in consumerism and the number of married women in paid work in light of the centrality of shopping and consumerism to the modern world. David R. Wells argues for women's incomplete gains from consumerism through an analysis of married women's employment, the structure of capitalism and the contradictory requirements of consumerism, the homemaker ideal and gender identity. Through this, Wells demonstrates how the gendered expectations of consumerism became motivating factors for women to join the workforce, resulting in higher standards of living and greater marital power.

First published in 1999, this book contains the findings of an exploratory study using in-depth interviews on parenting and the dynamics of Hong Kong Chinese stepfamilies. The stepfamily is a topic which is in lack of local research in Hong Kong, but is an emerging family structure which has increasing need for professional intervention. This study began as a result of the researcher's concern about the soaring number of divorces and broken families in Hong Kong and her curiosity to uncover the untold stories of stepfamilies. The literature review, presentation and thematic analysis of the findings of this study will increase the readers knowledge and understanding of stepfamilies in contexts which are different from Western societies. This book unveils the perceptions and life experiences of the stepmothers, social workers and teachers attitudes towards stepfamilies and the parenting behaviours of stepfamilies in Hong Kong. The author has reflectively analyzed the complex interplay between the social attitudes, cultural stereotyping of stepfamilies influenced by Chinese traditional values, aspirations towards marriage and marital relationships, parental expectations and parent-child relationships, ideology and policy issues affecting professional intervention.

Amorous jealousy is not a monster, as Shakespeare's venomous Iago claims. It is neither prickly and bitter fancy, nor a cruel and mean passion, nor a symptom of feeble self-esteem. All those who have experienced its wounds are well aware that it is not callous, nasty, delusional and ridiculous. It is just painful. Yet for centuries moralists have poured scorn and contempt on a feeling that, in their view, we should fight in every possible way. It is allegedly a disease to be treated, a moral vice to be eradicated, an ugly, pre-modern, illiberal, proprietary emotion to be overcome. Above all, no-one should ever admit to being jealous. So should we silence this embarrassing sentiment? Or should we see it, like the heroines of Greek tragedy, as a fundamental human demand for reciprocity in love? By examining its cultural history from the ancient Greeks to La Rochefoucauld, Hobbes, Kant, Stendhal, Freud, Beauvoir, Sartre, and Lacan, this book demonstrates how jealousy, far from being a "green-eyed" fiend, reveals the intense and apprehensive nature of all erotic love, which is the desire to be desired. We should never be ashamed to love.

This book examines the complex impact of prenatal stress and the mechanism of its transmission on children's development and well-being, including prenatal programming, epigenetics, infl ammatory processes, and the brain-gut microbiome. It analyzes current findings on prenatal stressors affecting pregnancy, including preconception stress, prenatal maternal depression, anxiety, and pregnancy-specific anxieties. Chapters explore how prenatal stress affects cognitive, affective, behavioral, and neurobiological development in children while pinpointing core processes of adaptation, resilience, and interventions that may reduce negative behaviors and promote optimal outcomes in children. Th is complex perspective on mechanisms by which early environmental influences interact with prenatal programming of susceptibility aims to inform clinical strategies and future research targeting prenatal stress and its cyclical impact on subsequent generations. Key areas of coverage include: The developmental effects of prenatal maternal stress on children. Epigenetic effects of prenatal stress. Intergenerational transmission of parental early life stress. The microbiome-gut-brain axis and the effects of prenatal stress on early neurodevelopment. The effect of prenatal stress on parenting. Gestational stress and resilience. Prenatal stress and children's sleeping behavior. Prenatal, perinatal, and population-based interventions to prevent psychopathology. Prenatal Stress and Child Development is an essential resource for researchers, professors and graduate students as well as clinicians, therapists, and related professionals in infancy and early childhood development, maternal and child health, developmental psychology, pediatrics, social work, child and adolescent psychiatry, developmental neuroscience, and related behavioral and social sciences and medical disciplines. Excerpt from the foreword: "I would make the plea that in addition to anyone with an interest in child development, this book should be essential reading for researchers pursuing "pre-clinical, basic science models of neurodevelopment and brain health".... This book provides what in my mind is the most advanced compilation of existing knowledge and state-of-the-art science in the field of prenatal psychiatry/psychology (and perhaps in the entire field of prenatal medicine). This volume can brilliantly serve to focus future directions in our understanding of the perinatal determinants of brain health."Michael J Meaney James McGill Professor of Medicine Translational Neuroscience Programme Adjunct Professor of Paediatrics

We think of our family life as very personal, but in fact it is shaped by influences well beyond our control. This book identifies the ways in which family and personal life in three "settler" societies - Australia, New Zealand and Canada - has been shaped by colonization, immigration, globalization, demographic changes, law and policy.;Baker shows that these three countries, each a former colony, developed similar family trends and similar family policies. Strongly gendered patterns of paid and unpaid work played a major role in family life. The family practices of indigenous people were largely overlooked, as were those of recent immigrant groups. However local conditions also produced significant differences in family experiences among the three countries.;Richly illustrated with examples, comparative data and textual sources, the book provides a broad-ranging analysis of the family which should appeal to students, researchers and policy-makers.

Published in 1997. Adolescent mothers are more likely to encounter a variety of economic and social ills than women who delay childbearing until they are adults. This work is a comprehensive examination of the extent to which these undesirable outcomes are attributable to teen pregnancy itself rather than to the wider environment in which most of the pregnancies and the subsequent child-rearing take place. It also examines the consequences of adolescent pregnancy for the fathers of children, and even more importantly, for the children themselves.

For the past thirty-five years, John Gottman's research has been internationally recognized for its unprecedented ability to precisely measure interactive processes in couples and to predict the long-term success or failure of relationships. In this groundbreaking book, he presents a new approach to understanding and changing couples: a fundamental social skill called "emotional attunement," which describes a couple's ability to fully process and move on from negative emotional events, ultimately creating a stronger relationship. Gottman draws from this longitudinal research and theory to show how emotional attunement can downregulate negative affect, help couples focus on positive traits and memories, and even help prevent domestic violence. He offers a detailed intervention devised to cultivate attunement, thereby helping couples connect, respect, and show affection. Emotional attunement is extended to tackle the subjects of flooding, the story we tell ourselves about our relationship, conflict, personality, changing relationships, and gender. Gottman also explains how to create emotional attunement when it is missing, to lay a foundation that will carry the relationship through difficult times. Gottman encourages couples to cultivate attunement through awareness, tolerance, understanding, non-defensive listening, and empathy. These qualities, he argues, inspire confidence in couples, and the sense that despite the inevitable struggles, the relationship is enduring and resilient. This book, an essential follow-up to his 1999 The Marriage Clinic, offers therapists, students, and researchers detailed intervention for working with couples, and offers couples a roadmap to a stronger future together.

Adults are being incarcerated in the United States at an ever-escalating rate, and child welfare professionals are encountering growing numbers of children who have parents in prison. Current estimates indicate that as many as 1.5 million children have an incarcerated parent; many thousands of others have experienced the incarceration of a parent at some point in their lives. These vulnerable children face unique difficulties, and their growing numbers and special needs demand attention. Existing literature indicates that children whose parents are incarcerated experience a variety of negative consequences, particularly in terms of their emotional health and well being. They also may have difficult interactions or limited contact with their parents. There are also issues connected with their physical care and child custody. The many challenges facing the child welfare system as it attempts to work with this population are explored in Children with Parents in Prison. Topics covered include: "Supporting Families and Children of Mothers in Jail"; "Meeting the Challenge of Permanency Planning for Children with Incarcerated Mothers"; "The Impact of Changing Public Policy on Relatives Caring for Children with Incarcerated Parents"; "Legal Issues and Recommendations"; "Facilitating Parent-Child Contact in Correctional Settings"; "Earning Trust from Youths with None to Spare"; "Developing Quality Services for Offenders and Families"; and in closing, "Understanding the Forces that Influence Incarcerated Fathers' Relationships with Their Children." Children and families have long struggled with the difficulties created when a parent goes to prison. What is new is the magnitude of the problem. This volume calls for increased public awareness of the impact of parental incarceration on children. Its goal is to stimulate discussion about how to best meet the special needs of these children and families and how to provide a resource for the child welfare community as it responds to the growing numbers of children made vulnerable by their parents' incarceration. Cynthia Seymour is general counsel at the Child Welfare League of America in Washington, DC. Creasie Finney Hairston is dean and professor at Jane Addams College of Social Work, the University of Illinois at Chicago.

This volume examines the lives of young adolescents in Japanese middle schools, focusing on the dynamics of school, family, and social life, and explores the change from child to adolescent that takes place in the middle school years.
The book discusses several themes which play a major role in how Japanese adolescents deal with school, academic pressure, social maturation, social hierarchy, personality development, and the development of gender identity.
Students of varying economic, family, and social backgrounds tell their stories. In describing and analyzing the lives of middle school students, Drs LeTendre and Fukuzawa offer the reader a new perspective on Japanese education and society that demonstrates the successes and problems faced by Japanese students, parents, and teachers.

This book represents a new direction in the study of religion and marriage by using a postmodern theoretical framework focusing on gendered discourse and culture, to examine the meaning of sacred marriage within social contexts. Drawing upon data from in-depth interviews of couples in long-term, sacred marriages living in the American Midwest, together with an analysis of Christian marriage advice manuals, Sacred Marriages explores how couples use religious and nonreligious discourses and cultures to give their marriages meaning, and how those sacred meanings are used in their daily lives and the spaces that they embody. The study shows how religious and secular beliefs are combined to formulate cultural strategies for approaching the sacralization of marriage, and how religious and nonreligious discourses and cultures are ordered, depending on circumstances and social contexts. This often results in other relationships being subordinated in favour of the sacred bond believed to exist between husband and wife. The book argues that sacred marriage is a malleable concept, as people bend religious culture to form new and altered sacred marriages during emotional extremes. A thoughtful examination of long-term Christian marriages, this volume will appeal to scholars of religion and sociology with interests in marriage and the family.

Written in an accessible, case study format, this groundbreaking work explores the formulation, implementation, and evaluation of family leave policy in the United States, from its beginnings at the state level in the early 1980s, through the adoption of the federal Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993, and beyond to the present day. With a political economy perspective, the book identifies the major economic and social forces affecting both the family and the workplace. And drawing on original primary research, it examines how the political system has responded to this evolving issue with various policy initiatives.

In this compelling book, Shawn Johansen explodes the myth of the cold and distant Victorian patriarch, whose domestic roles were limited to those of provider and disiplinarian. Using a rich selection of personal writings he contends that their domestic lives were much more complex, involving domestic chores, caring for children and a more active role in parenting than previously thought.

Written in an accessible, case study format, this groundbreaking work explores the formulation, implementation, and evaluation of family leave policy in the United States, from its beginnings at the state level in the early 1980s, through the adoption of the federal Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993, and beyond to the present day. With a political economy perspective, the book identifies the major economic and social forces affecting both the family and the workplace. And drawing on original primary research, it examines how the political system has responded to this evolving issue with various policy initiatives.

Despite a growing body of scholarship on the phenomenon of adolescent parenting, minimal attention has been given to investigating systematic changes in adolescent mothers' and their children's psychological functioning over time. This book reports on a longitudinal study conducted to examine the social and psychological consequences of teen parenting for both mothers and their children. Qualitative and quantitative analyses are used to explain why some mothers and children fare better than others, showing that the lives and developmental trajectories of adolescent mothers and children are inextricably interwoven and closely linked to the social contexts within which they live. The book closes with social policy implications of the research including recommendations for intervention programs and policies to help adolescent parents and their children achieve developmental success and find happiness.

This title was first published in 2003: Although young people are generally very healthy, it has become clear that many of the health behaviours of young people can have serious consequences later in life. This is particularly so with the management of chronic illness, where poor management can result in serious long-term complications. This book explores how gender differentially affects both the ways in which young people manage chronic illness and the ways in which mothers care for their teenage sons and daughters. Until recently, where gender and health have been linked, the focus has typically been on women rather than men. However, there is growing interest in the health of men, with the recognition that masculinities and health interact in specific, sometimes detrimental ways. Most books examine either women's, or less commonly, men's health, but the comparative approach proposed reflects a growing academic and empirical trend which aims to develop new theoretical perspectives both on gender and on the relationship between gender and health. The book also challenges assumptions that gender is static, by exploring the effects of gender at a specific time of transition in the life course. The focus on adolescence is important, as it is seen by many to be the time when heterosexual values are most powerfully pursued and enforced, thus enabling interactions between gender and health to be thrown into relief. The approach adopted takes issue with many current ideas about young people, which tend to portray them as autonomous individuals, acting independently. For example, in terms of health care for young people with a chronic illness, health professionals generally adopt an individualistic approach, stressing the importance of independence for young people. Rather than seeing young people as purely autonomous, this book relocates them within families, in transition between childhood and adulthood and acting interdependently with other family members. Little is known about the complex deci

Family life has changed rapidly over te past fifty years and the number of people living longer increases year on year Family and Community Life of Older People revisits three areas (Bethnal Green in London, Wolverhampton in the Midlands and Woodford in Essex) which were the subject of classic studies in the late 1940s and 1950s and explores changes to the family and community lives of older people. The book examines issues such as:
*changes in household composition
*changes in the geographical proximity of kin and relatives
*the extent and type of help provided by the family
*contact and relationships with neighbours
*relationships with friends
*involvement in social and leisure activities
*experiences of minority ethnic groups.
These questions are explored through a unique set of data including census material, and survey data from interviews with over 600 older people. A key finding is that over the past 50 years we have moved from an old age experienced within the context of the family group to one shaped by personal communities in which friends may feature as significantly as immediate kin and relatives.
Family and Community Life of Older People is a major contribution to the sociology of the family, of ageing, and of urban life and points up the social policy issues for an ageing society.

Individuals of all ages interact with one another, and their interactions have significance throughout their lives. This distinctive volume acknowledges the importance of these interactions and provides a life-span developmental view of communication and aging, attempting to capture the many similarities and changes that occur in people's lives as they age. The authors move the study of intergenerational contact closer to the actual participants, examining what happens within intergenerational interactions and how people evaluate their intergenerational experiences. The volume concentrates on the micro-context of the intergenerational interaction and the cognitions, language, and relationship behaviors related to intergenerational communication across the life span.
The volume employs the perspective that the understanding of human behavior across the life span is enhanced by studying communicative behavior in intergenerational interaction. The authors integrate research from multiple disciplines concerned with intergenerational communication, which is framed by several unique theoretical perspectives drawn from the communication discipline. As a resource for the study of intergenerational communication across the life span, this monograph offers important insights to scholars, students, and all who are involved in intergenerational communication.

This unique and groundbreaking book seeks to re-focus gender debate onto the issue of daughter discrimination - a phenomenon still hidden and unacknowledged across the world.
It asks the controversial question of why millions of girls do not appear to be surviving to adulthood in contemporary Asia. In the first major study available of this emotive and sensitive issue, Elisabeth Croll investigates the extent of discrimination against female children in Asia and shifts the focus of attention firmly from son-preference to daughter-discrimination.
This book brings together demographic data and anthropological field studies to reveal the multiple ways in which girls are disadvantaged, from excessive child mortality to the withholding of health care and education on the basis of gender. Focusing especially on China and India, the book reveals the surprising coincidence of increasing daughter discrimination with rising economic development, declining fertility and the generally improved status of women in East and South Asia. Essential reading for all those interested in gender in contemporary society.
Case studies include:
* China
* Republic of Korea
* Taiwan
* Vietnam
* India
* Pakistan
* Bangladesh