In Reconstructing Marriage - The Legal Status of Relationships in a Changing Society Caroline Sorgjerd explores the essence of the institution of marriage: what is the meaning of marriage today, how has marriage been influenced by the legal recognition of new cohabitation models and what should be the role of the institution of marriage in the future? In order to understand what marriage actually is in the twenty-first century it is necessary to identify and analyze the formalities and function of marriage in society. With a focus on Sweden, the author examines the historical development of marriage - beginning as a 'gift from God' and now being a gender-neutral institution - from a legal and political perspective and taking into account the past and present role of the Church of Sweden. The author then makes comparative assessments concerning the legal and political developments leading toward the adoption of gender-neutral marriage concepts in the Netherlands and Spain despite different societal backgrounds. In addition, the significance of the marital status under European Union law is explored, under the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union and in the jurisprudence of the European Court of Justice. Also the relevant decisions based on the European Convention of Human Rights, as interpreted by the European Court of Human Rights, are examined. The author discovers that the key role that the institution of marriage has played in the past still influences the essence of marriage today and charges it with a special symbolic value.

Originally published in 1983, in the two decades prior to publication, specialised neonatal units for the treatment of sick or preterm babies had been set up in most major neonatal centres. In the early years these units did little to prevent separation of parents and babies and evidence accumulated of the ill effects of this situation. In addition, we had gradually become aware of the difficulties of building a relationship with a sick or immature baby even under more ideal circumstances. This book, in a series of authoritative review chapters, sets out to describe the process by which social relationships develop after birth and the ways in which this process may be distorted by separation, the condition of the baby or by the process of medical treatment. Experienced practitioners describe practical steps which may be taken to support parents and foster their relationship with their babies in treatment situations. The final section of the book examines the organisation of neonatal care in a number of widely different settings and indicates that diverse approaches may be successful in achieving the same ends.

Toward the end of the fifteenth century, the Habsburg family began to rely on dynastic marriage to unite an array of territories, eventually creating an empire as had not been seen in Europe since the Romans. Other European rulers followed the Habsburgs' lead in forging ties through dynastic marriages. Because of these marriages, many more aristocrats (especially women) left their homelands to reside elsewhere. Until now, historians have viewed these unions from a primarily political viewpoint and have paid scant attention to the personal dimensions of these relocations. Separated from their family and thrust into a strange new land in which language, attire, religion, food, and cultural practices were often different, these young aristocrats were forced to conform to new customs or adapt their own customs to a new cultural setting. Early Modern Dynastic Marriages and Cultural Transfer examines these marriages as important agents of cultural transfer, emphasizing how marriages could lead to the creation of a cosmopolitan culture, common to the elites of Europe. These essays focus on the personal and domestic dimensions of early modern European court life, examining such areas as women's devotional practices, fashion, patronage, and culinary traditions.

The study of new literacies is quickly emerging as a major research field. This book « samples work in the broad area of new literacies research along two dimensions. First, it samples some typical examples of new literacies - video gaming, fan fiction writing, weblogging, role play gaming, using websites to participate in affinity practices, memes, and other social activities involving mobile technologies. Second, the studies collectively sample from a wide range of approaches potentially available for researching and studying new literacies from a sociocultural perspective. Readers will come away with a rich sense of what new literacies are, and a generous appreciation of how they are being researched.

This edited volume in American constitutionalism places the Supreme Court's declaration of same-sex marriage rights in U.S. v. Windsor (2013) and Obergefell v. Hodges (2015) within the context of the Court's developing understanding of the legal and social status of marriage and the family. Leading scholars in the fields of political science, law, and religion examine the roots of the Court's affirmation of same-sex rights in a number of areas related to marriage and the family including the right to marry, equality and happiness in marriage, the right to privacy, freedom of association, property rights, parental power, and reproductive rights. Taken together, these essays evaluate the extent to which the Court's recent marriage rulings both break with and derive from the competing principles of American Constitutionalism.

The most important influence shaping the religious and spiritual lives of children, youth, and teenagers is their parents. A myriad of studies show that the parents of American youth play the leading role in shaping the character of their religious and spiritual lives, even well after they leave home and often for the rest of their lives. We know a lot about the importance of parents in faith transmission. However we know much less about the actual beliefs, feelings, and activities of the parents themselves, what Christian Smith and Amy Adamczyk call the "intergenerational transmission of religious faith and practice." To address that gap, this book reports the findings of a new national study of religious parents in the United States. The findings and conclusions in Handing Down the Faith are based on 215 in-depth, personal interviews with religious parents from many traditions and different parts of the country, and sophisticated analyses of two nationally representative surveys of American parents about their religious parenting. Handing Down the Faith explores the background beliefs informing how and why religious parents seek to pass on religion to their children; examines how parenting styles interact with parent religiousness to shape effective religious transmission; shows how parents have been influenced by their experiences as children influenced by their own parents; reveals how religious parents view their congregations and what they most seek out in a local church, synagogue, temple, or mosque; explores the experiences and outlooks of immigrant parents including Latino Catholics, East Asian Buddhists, South Asian Muslims, and Indian Hindus. Smith and Adamczyk step back to consider how American religion has transformed over the last 100 years and to explain why parents today shoulder such a huge responsibility in transmitting religious faith and practice to their children. The book is rich in empirical evidence and unique in many of the topics it explores and explains, providing a variety of sometimes counterintuitive findings that will interest scholars of religion, social scientists interested in the family, parenting, and socialization; clergy and religious educators and leaders; and religious parents themselves.

Framed by a comprehensive review of international research, literature, and film, this book is an intimate journey into the experiences and insights of 79 Australian women in relationships with bisexual men. It takes us into the daily lives, sexual intimacies, and families of MOREs (mixed-orientation relationships) that span the gamut from extremely oppressive experiences with bi-misogynist men to extremely liberating with bi-profeminist men. Aged 19 to 65, the women are in monogamous, open, and polyamorous relationships with bisexual-identifying and/or bisexual-behaving men. The women themselves are bisexual, lesbian, heterosexual, while others refuse to categorize their own sexualities. The book addresses the discovery or disclosure of the man's bisexuality, how the relationships work and where they flounder, how the partners negotiate and establish 'new rules' and boundaries to maintain their relationship, and the impact of class, rural/urban setting, ethnicity, indigeneity, race, religion, and education on these relationships. But this book isn't only about MOREs. The research, revelations and reflections in this book tell us much about current and shifting global constructions and understandings of intimate relationships, sexual desires and love, and the socio-cultural representations and labeling of genders and sexualities.

Sharing Lives explores the most important human relationships which last for the longest period of our lives: those between adult children and their parents. Offering a new reference point for studies on the sociology of family, the book focuses on the reasons and results of lifelong intergenerational solidarity by looking at individuals, families and societies. This monograph combines theoretical reasoning with empirical research, based on the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE). The book focuses on the following areas: Adult family generations, from young adulthood to the end of life, and beyond Contact, conflict, coresidence, money, time, inheritance Consequences of lifelong solidarity Family generations and the relationship of family and the welfare state Connections between family cohesion and social inequality. Sharing Lives offers reliable findings on the basis of state-of-the-art methods and the best available data, and presents these findings in an accessible manner. This book will appeal to researchers, policymakers and graduate students in the areas of sociology, political science, psychology and economics. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781315647319, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

In India, girls are aborted on a massive scale merely because they are girls. Underlying this widespread problem is the puzzling fact that daughters have become vulnerable in a time of general improvement of welfare, female status and deep economic and social changes. The findings centre on a contradiction between the continued importance of the cultural factors which for so long have established that a son is necessary, and socio-economic changes that are challenging the importance of these very same factors. This contradiction entails an uncertainty over sons fulfilling expectations which has, rather than tilt the balance in favour of daughters, instead increased the relative importance of sons and intensified negative consequences for daughters. The original findings are based on set theoretic systematic comparisons of eight villages in Himachal Pradesh that facilitate a reconceptualization and an alternative analysis that takes contextual differences into account. It builds on extensive fieldwork and collection of both qualitative and quantitative data.

While acknowledging the ways in which persecution inevitably affects a community, this book deviates from most Jewish studies to survey the ways in which Jewish history has been shaped by the everyday experience of love. It examines erotic poetry, sensual art and literature, and biblical and rabbinic stories about lust. It reviews the ways in which Jewish law has both encouraged and regulated sexual interaction and studies the diversity of Jewish attitudes toward such relationships, found in a vast array of works whose authors and artists often speak to the confusion and failure of love while also finding a purpose in its pursuance. It tells the stories of those people who revel in love and of others who remember love and grieve in its absence.

Any agenda for family research in the 1990s must take seriously a contextual approach to the study of family relationships. The editors and contributors to this volume believe that the richness in family studies over the next decade will come from considering the diversity of family forms -- different ethnic groups and cultures, different stages of family life, as well as different historical cohorts. Their goal is to make more explicit how we think about families in order to study them and understand them. To illustrate the need for diversity in family studies, examples are presented from new and old families, majority and minority families, American and Japanese families, and intact and divorcing families. This variety is intended to push the limits of current thinking, not only for researchers but also for all who are struggling to live with and work with families in a time when family life is valued but fragmented and relatively unsupported by society's institutions. Students and researchers interested in family development from the viewpoint of any of the social sciences will find this book of value.

This work assembles a group of international scholars to address issues on marriage and the state, motivations to marry, partner selections, marriage ceremonies, religion, kinship ties and marriage, sexual interaction and marriage, and divorce.

An experienced teacher of courses on the sociology of the family, D.H.J. Morgan frequently encounters a gulf between 'the family' as it is often treated in sociological texts and 'the family' as it is usually experienced. In this book he provides an extremely valuable bridge between the two by presenting an encounter between some of the mainstream theoretical approaches and concerns in the sociology of the family and what he terms as 'critical' perspectives on the family. This is the first British book on a basic social institution that takes into account the literature outside the mainstream of sociological analysis that deals with the subject. The first half examines the varieties of functional theorizing embedded in many texts, the over-concern with the question of kinship in modern society and the treatment of the family as a 'success story'. In the second half Dr Morgan presents a critical account of some of the counter-theories: those derived from the radical feminist movement, the existential psycho-analytical approach associated with Laing, and the critical analyses of sex in an advanced capitalist society. A final chapter suggests some themes and orientations, derived from this encounter of theoretical approaches and modern perspectives, which can be usefully developed.

The second edition of Race and Family maintains the book's distinctive feature-introducing students to key concepts through a structural lens-while featuring new material throughout. Race and Family focuses on structural factors impacting all families, such as demographic, economic, and historic trends, which illuminate the similarities and distinctions among and within racial and ethnic groups. After introductions to the study of race, ethnicity, and the family, the book explores various issues such as family structure, divorce, non-marital births, gender roles, racial identity formation, intergenerational roles, grandparenting, care of elders, and more. The book offers specific chapters on racial-ethnic groups including African American, Asian American, Latino American, Middle Eastern American, and Native American, while also discussing white families, multiracial families, the acculturation process, and more. Key updates to the second edition include recent census and survey data, a new chapter on Middle Eastern Americans, new material on multiracial and multicultural families, updated resources, and more. The second edition of Race and Family is a comprehensive introduction to race and family through a distinctive structural lens. The book provides structural factors, cross-cultural perspectives, and historical overviews that students can use to analyze the whys and ways of family across races and ethnicities. A complimentary test bank is available to adopters as a Word document or via the free program Respondus. Email [email protected] for further details.

Handbook of Family Life Education covers a wide range of educational and preventive programs to improve the quality of individual and family life. Although it has a long history, only recently has there been a movement toward professionalization of these programs or an intellectual justification for them developed. The Handbook of Family Life Education is the first to provide a framework for this field. Its purpose is to provide an introduction to a critical perspective on family life education--both its major intellectual themes and its areas of practice--for researchers, policymakers, curriculum and program planners, and practitioners. "Finally, there is a comprehensive resource on family life education. As the editors write in the preface, previous handbooks included discussion of family life education, but often only as one of the many chapters. Further, any earlier volume had become dated given the changes and evolving sophistication of the field. A new reference resource was needed, and these two volumes will meet that need. Hats off to the editors!" --Family Forum "This book is the most extensive compilation of research and practice regarding family life education that has been written. In the two volumes, the editors have assembled a diverse group of scholars to describe the fundamental issues and to discuss the state of the art in family life education. . . . These two volumes provide an extensive foundation for scholars, students, and practitioners interested in family life education. These volumes draw together an often disparate and disorganized body of knowledge and establish a basis for considering theoretical and methodological issues. Many of the chapters provide thorough reviews and critiques of the family life programs and insightful recommendations about future decisions. . . . the Handbook of Family Life Education is a substantial contribution to the field and will be very useful in undergraduate and graduate courses on family life education and to scholars and practitioners interested in other important issues confronting the field." --Family Relations "This is without a doubt the most complete, encyclopedic treatise on family life education available on the market, bar none. It contains all the information that either beginning family life educators or consummate professionals need to know about this field, past, present, and future. I recommend it wholeheartedly, not only to family life educators, but also to marriage and family therapists. Perhaps, in the not too distant future, all of the information contained in both volumes will be used by anyone who is interested in helping families, regardless of professional identity or theoretical orientation." --Luciano L'Abate, Georgia State University HANDBOOK OF FAMILY LIFE EDUCATION, VOLUME 1 Foundations of Family Life Education This first volume of the Handbook of Family Life Education serves as a major resource for those who teach, practice, and do research in family life education. It documents the current status of the field and provides an introduction to and a critical perspective on family life education. The contributing authors address such topics as the nature of family life education, its evolution as a field of practice, and its intellectual and philosophical foundations. The central theme of values and the tasks of planning, implementation, and evaluation of family life programs are also examined. Where applicable, matters of ethnicity, gender, and religion are addressed.

In 1958, Suzanne and Ezra Vogel embedded themselves in a Tokyo suburban community, interviewing six middle-class families regularly for a year. Their research led to Japan's New Middle Class, a classic work on the sociology of Japan. Now, Suzanne Hall Vogel's compelling sequel traces the evolution of Japanese society over the ensuing decades through the lives of three of these ordinary yet remarkable women and their daughters and granddaughters. Vogel contends that the role of the professional housewife constrained Japanese middle-class women in the postwar era-and yet it empowered them as well. Precisely because of fixed gender roles, with women focusing on the home and children while men focused on work, Japanese housewives had remarkable authority and autonomy within their designated realm. Wives and mothers now have more options than their mothers and grandmothers did, but they find themselves unprepared to cope with this new era of choice. These gripping biographies poignantly illustrate the strengths and the vulnerabilities of professional housewives and of families facing social change and economic uncertainty in contemporary Japan.

From novels of the nineteenth century to films of the 1990s, American culture, abounds with images of white, middle-class mothers. In Motherhood and Representation, E. Ann Kaplan considers how the mother appears in three related spheres: the historical, in which she charts changing representations of the mother from 1830 to the postmodernist present; the psychoanalytic, which discusses theories of the mother from Freud to Lacan and the French Feminists; and the mother as she is figured in cultural representations: in literary and film texts such as East Lynne, Marnie and the The Handmaid's Tale, as well as in journalism and popular manuals on motherhood. Kaplan's analysis identifies two dominant paradigms of the mother as `Angel' and `Witch', and charts the contesting and often contradictory discourses of the mother in present-day America.

In the twenty-first century, fatherhood is shifting from simply being a sidekick in the parental team to taking center stage with new expectations of involvement and caretaking. The social expectations of fathers start even before the children are born. Mr. Mom is now displaced with fathers who don't think of themselves as babysitting their own children, but as central decision makers, along with mothers, as parents. Deconstructing Dads: Changing Images of Fathers in Popular Culture is an interdisciplinary edited collection of essays authored by prominent scholars in the fields of media, sociology, and cultural studies who address how media represent the image of the father in popular culture. This collection explores the history of representation of fathers like the "bumbling dad" to question and challenge how far popular culture has come in its representation of paternal figures. Each chapter of this book focuses on a different aspect of media, including how advertising creates expectations of play and father, crime shows and the new hero father, and men as paternal figures in horror films. The book also explores changing definitions of fatherhood by looking at such subjects as how the media represents sperm donation as complicating the definition of father and how specific groups have been represented as fathers, including gay men as dads and Latino fathers in film. This collection examines the media's depiction of the "good" father to study how it both challenges and reshapes the ways in which we think of family, masculinity, and gender roles.

Drawing extensively from agency records, newspaper accounts, sociological studies and court documents, Hough explores the experiences of rural white unwed mothers in Maine and Tennessee.

The second edition of Race and Family maintains the book's distinctive feature-introducing students to key concepts through a structural lens-while featuring new material throughout. Race and Family focuses on structural factors impacting all families, such as demographic, economic, and historic trends, which illuminate the similarities and distinctions among and within racial and ethnic groups. After introductions to the study of race, ethnicity, and the family, the book explores various issues such as family structure, divorce, non-marital births, gender roles, racial identity formation, intergenerational roles, grandparenting, care of elders, and more. The book offers specific chapters on racial-ethnic groups including African American, Asian American, Latino American, Middle Eastern American, and Native American, while also discussing white families, multiracial families, the acculturation process, and more. Key updates to the second edition include recent census and survey data, a new chapter on Middle Eastern Americans, new material on multiracial and multicultural families, updated resources, and more. The second edition of Race and Family is a comprehensive introduction to race and family through a distinctive structural lens. The book provides structural factors, cross-cultural perspectives, and historical overviews that students can use to analyze the whys and ways of family across races and ethnicities. A complimentary test bank is available to adopters as a Word document or via the free program Respondus. Email [email protected] for further details.

A longitudinal, intersectional study of migrant women, this book examines the lives of first generation Bangladeshi migrants to the UK, considering the dynamic relationship between people and place. Shedding new light on a migrant population about which little is known, the author explores the experiences of women who left rural homes to live in London, speaking no English, with no experience of local customs and having to adjust to what would now be dramatically shrunken family sizes, within which they would act as bearers of culture and tradition. Based on research spanning a decade Family, Citizenship and Islam draws on qualitative interviews with over 100 women and examines questions of identity, belonging, citizenship and Britishness, religion, ageing, care, and the family. With attention to the fluidity of the experiences of the first generation of migration women, the book offers an alternative to much ethnographic research, which often offers only a 'snapshot' of a particular minority or migrant group as fixed and preserved in time. As such, Family, Citizenship and Islam will appeal to scholars of sociology, geography and anthropology with interests in migration and diaspora, citizenship, gender, religion, family and the lifecourse, and the ways in which these different aspects of a person's life come together to shape lived experience.

What can we learn from inquiries into cases of fatal child abuse? Beyond Blame offers a new way of looking at such cases and shows that it is possible to draw important lessons from them. The authors, all three experienced in child protection work, summarise thirty-five major inquiries since 1973, setting them in their social context and discussing the implications both for practical work in the field and for future inquiries. They stress the need for those who work day to day in child protection to develop and apply a more sophisticated level of analysis to assessment and intervention. They identify common themes within abusing families, in the relationships between members of the professional networks, and in the interactions between the families and the professionals.

The volume takes a close look at the forms and functions of family and kinship in cultural narratives in the United States. It analyzes social and cultural contexts of kinship and family membership, relations of family and nation on a metaphorical level, and the political discourses that regulate sexuality and reproduction. Representations of family and kinship inform all aspects of American life, which is prominently noticeable in politics, legislation, art, and the media. Family discourses are employed to communicate and negotiate constellations of power and they can serve to investigate differences, struggles, alliances, strategic endeavors, and innovative conceptualizations of kinship. The essays collected in this volume provide readings of texts across various genres that highlight the role of cultural production in reconfiguring paradigms of family and kinship in the US.

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.

Screening applicants for adoption or foster homes has life-altering consequences for the children involved, yet there are incredibly few programs available to train screeners. The educational system that certifies thousands of social workers each year does not understand the specialized training required to screen adoptive and foster parents; social work schools provide minimal interview training and what training they do provide focuses on therapeutic interview techniques rather than screening skills. There is a clear need for a book like Adoptive and Foster Parent Screening, one that can be incorporated into course requirements and used by working social workers and psychologists involved with adoption and foster parent screening. Adoptive and Foster Parent Screening, written by a former social worker, who has placed hundreds of children into adoptive and foster homes, and a clinical psychologist, meshes the best of psychology and social work experience into a definitive guide for screening adoption and foster home applicants. The book provides information on: evaluating aberrant behavior and unhealthy parenting attitudes interview techniques psychological testing. Adoptive and Foster Parent Screening is based on case histories, research data, and interpretive analysis. The book is written in an accessible style free of technical language, thus making it appropriate for college-level students and professionals who don't have time to sift through empirical data to obtain accessible information that they can adapt to their profession.