While becoming a parent is relatively easy, parenting is a skill that is learned and improved over a lifetime. This reference book provides a comprehensive summary of what we know about parents and parent-child relationships. Through more than 240 alphabetically arranged entries, the volume synthesizes the present state of research on parenting. Each entry is written by an expert contributor and represents an authoritative view on a particular topic. Entries are related to child activity, child outcomes, child states, parent behaviors, parental situations, external and community concerns, systemic issues, the transition to parenthood, available resources, and various persons who have shaped our knowledge of parenting. The entries draw on information from a wide range of disciplines, including psychology, education, and sociology. Each entry includes a brief bibliography, and the volume closes with a selected list of works for further reading. The word parent is most often used to refer to a biological relationship with a child. But the word parent, like mother and father, can also invoke acts of caring, nurturing, and protecting. When we say, That child needs a father, we imply that the child needs a relationship with a man capable of fathering. This emphasizes a social and emotional relationship, not merely a biological one. Parenting means assuming responsibility for the long-term care of a child. Becoming a parent is relatively easy. But parenting is a skill that is learned and improved over a lifetime. Moreover, parenting is a skill that becomes more complex in response to the demands of a changing society. Some elements of successful parenting are relatively abstract and seem to remain fairly constant across different generations. But with the rise of new social problems and the proliferation of various threats to the integrity of the nuclear family, the parenting strategies of a generation ago are not necessarily effective today. Parenting has also received growing amounts of attention from researchers, and what was once considered chiefly an art is now also recognized for being a science. Our knowledge of parenting has increased significantly in the last few decades, and new developments continue to be made daily. This reference book provides a comprehensive summary of what we know about parents and the parent-child relationship. Through more than 240 alphabetically arranged entries, the volume synthesizes the present state of research on parenting. Each entry is written by an expert contributor and provides an authoritative overview of a particular topic. Entries are related to child activity, child outcomes, child states, parent behaviors, parental situations, external and community factors, systemic concerns, the transition to parenthood, available resources, and a number of persons who have added to our knowledge of the field. The entries draw on a wide range of disciplines, including psychology, education, and sociology. Each entry closes with a brief bibliography, and the volume concludes with a selected list of works for further reading.

This insightful volume presents important new findings about parenting and parent-child relationships in ethnic and racial minority immigrant families. Prominent scholars in diverse fields focus on families from a wide range of ethnicities settling in Canada, China, Israel, Italy, the Netherlands, and the United States. Each chapter discusses parenting and parent-child relationships in a broader cultural context, presenting within-group and cross-cultural data that provide readers with a rich understanding of parental values, beliefs, and practices that influence children's developmental outcomes in a new country. For example, topics of investigation include cultural variation in the role of fathers, parenting of young children across cultures, the socialization of academic and emotional development, as well as the interrelationships among stress, acculturation processes, and parent-child relationship dynamics. This timely reference: * explores immigration and families from a global, multidisciplinary perspective; * focuses on immigrant children and youth in the family context;* challenges long-held assumptions about parenting and immigrant families;* bridges the knowledge gap between immigrant and non-immigrant family studies;* describes innovative methodologies for studying immigrant family relationships; and* establishes the relevance of these data to the wider family literature. Parental Roles and Relationships in Immigrant Families is not only useful to researchers and to family therapists and social workers attending to immigrant families, but also highly informative for persons interested in shaping immigration policy at the local, national, and global levels.

This book examines the many roles of families in their members' food access, preferences, and consumption. It provides an overview of factors - from micro- to macro-levels - that have been linked to food insecurity and discusses policy approaches to reducing food insecurity and hunger. In addition, it addresses the links between food insecurity and overweight and obesity. The book describes changes in the U.S. food environment that may explain increases in obesity during recent decades. It explores relationships between parenting practices and the development of eating behaviors in children, highlighting the importance of family mealtimes in healthful eating. The volume provides an overview of efforts to prevent or reduce obesity in children, with attention to minority populations and discusses research findings on targets for obesity prevention, including a focus on fathers as change agents who play a crucial, yet understudied, role in food parenting. The book acknowledges that with the current obesigenic environment in the United States and elsewhere around the world, additional and innovative efforts are needed to foster healthful eating behavior and orientations toward food in childhood and in families. This book is a must-have resource for researchers, professors, clinicians, professionals, and graduate students in developmental psychology, family studies, public health as well as numerous interrelated disciplines, including sociology, demography, social work, prevention science, educational policy, political science, and economics.

Focusing on parental involvement in children's education in the USA, this volume covers such topics as: school, family and community partnerships; family involvement in Federal Education Programs; home-school commmunication; parent-child literacy projects; and family centres in schools.

"This is an excellent and rare exploration of a sensitive religious issue from many perspectives - legal, cultural and political. The case studies from Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand portray the important and exciting, yet very difficult, negotiation of Islamic teachings in the changing realities of Southeast Asia, home to the majority of Muslims in the world. Interreligious marriage is an important indicator of good relations between communities in religiously diverse countries. This book will also be of great interest to students and scholars of religious pluralism in a Southeast Asian context, which has not been studied adequately." - Zainal Abidin Bagir, Executive Director, Center for Religious and Cross-cultural Studies (CRCS), Gadjah Mada University, Indonesia "The issue of Muslim-non-Muslim marriages has different connotations in the different Southeast Asian states. For example, in Thailand it is more a fluid cultural issue but in Malaysia it reflects great racial schisms with severe legal implications. This book is a welcome one as it examines the issue not only from the perspectives of various Southeast Asian nations but also from so many angles; the legal, historical, social, cultural, anthropological and philosophical. The work is scholarly, yet accessible. Underlying it, there is a vital streak of humanism." - Azmi Sharom, Associate Professor, Faculty of Law, University of Malaya

This book offers a strengths-based, family-focused approach to improving the educational performance and school experience of struggling Black and Latino students. The book discusses educational challenges faced by low-income families of color and the different strengths within Black and Latino family life that can affect these challenges. It focuses building on these strengths within the children's home environments that can serve as a foundation for subsequent learning. The chapters describe a wide range of family practices and beliefs, including development of interventions to support families that promote early language and literacy, early mathematics, and social skills. The chapters also present quantitative and/or qualitative studies using a strengths-based approach to parents' socialization of their children's early academic skills. Topics featured in this book include: Latino and Black parental resources, investments, and beliefs Academic socialization in the homes of Black and Latino preschool children Development of culturally-informed interventions to promote children's school readiness skills Family-school partnerships as a tool for improving educational opportunities. Directions for future research Academic Socialization of Young Black and Latino Children is a must-have resource for researchers, educators, clinicians and related professionals, and graduate students in diverse fields including education, developmental and school psychology, family studies, counseling psychology and social work, and sociology of culture.

This book examines the intersections between the ways that marriage was represented in eighteenth-century writing and art, experienced in society, and regulated by law. The interdisciplinary and comparative essays explore the marital experience beyond the 'matrimonial barrier' to encompass representations of married life including issues of spousal abuse, parenting, incest, infidelity and the period after the end of marriage, to include annulment, widowhood and divorce. The chapters range from these focuses on legal and social histories of marriage to treatments of marriage in eighteenth-century periodicals, to depictions of married couples and families in eighteenth-century art, to parallels in French literature and diaries, to representations of violence and marriage in Gothic novels, and to surveys of same-sex partnerships. The volume is aimed towards students and scholars working in the long eighteenth century, gender studies, women's writing, publishing history, and art and legal historians.

This 18-volume set has titles originally published between 1932 and 1997 and covers many facets of adolescent life. Approached from a number of perspectives including sociological, psychological and educational, individual volumes examine key adolescent issues: from behaviour, family life and relationships, to school and (un)employment. This collection will be a great resource for those interested in the adolescent and their place in society throughout the twentieth century.

A comprehensive, case study portrait of the childrearing context of a predominantly Eskimo village in the remote Northwest Arctic, designed to look for evidence of "reinvention," "transformation," or "conscious choice" as process features of change in the mix of traditional childrearing beliefs and practices with infusions from the dominant culture. The rearing environment and child well-being were studied during 18 months of anthropological fieldwork in an Alaskan Inupiaq village in the Northwest Arctic. Volunteers for the sample consisted of 44 adults from 16 extended families who were raising a child between the ages of three and six years. Results from guided interviews, card sorts, standardized family and home assessments, and review of the children's medical records revealed a complex portrait of culture continuity and change and included the following trends: many traditions had been retained, even though villagers perceived few differences in their rearing style compared to that of mainstream culture despite the presence of other households with extended family members in the village and touting of the value of kinship, 25% of core families reared their children in relative isolation growth measurements, immunization status, and general health of the children were good, but children evidenced diets high in sugar and many suffered severe dental problems present-day caregivers were engaged in dialogue about "problem" parenting behaviors that had developed a generation earlier during a time of massive acculturation stress and population growth--namely, the overuse of scolding of children without attached explanations and overt favoring of specific children over others in thefamily. The study presents present-day rearing strategies and ideas as summarized from interviews and data from more formal instruments, and frames changes in the system within the broader historical/social context.

The book examines the relationship between family resilience and recovery from substance use disorders. It presents information on etiology of substance use disorders within the family system as well as new research on resilience in addiction recovery. The book facilitates the development of evidence-based resilience practices, programs, and policies for those working or dealing with families and addiction. Key topics addressed include: Protecting workers from opioid misuse and addiction. Neuroscience-informed psychoeducation and training for opioid use disorder. New models for training health care providers. Role of families in recovery capital. Family Resilience and Recovery from Opioids and Other Addictions is a must-have resource for researchers, professors, and graduate students as well as clinicians and related professionals in family studies, public health, and clinical psychology and all interrelated disciplines, including behavioral health, social work, and psychiatry.

This edited volume concerns childhood throughout South America after the 1990s, a period and territory of special complexity marked by the beginning-or intensification of-political neoliberalisation throughout the region. The decade also saw the ratification of the International Convention on Rights of the Child and post-dictatorial processes of political and social democratisation. The editors of this book explore the tension this juxtaposition has generated between logics and processes of dissimilar orientations. Within this framework, chapters investigate the neoliberalisation and institutionalisation of children's rights and consider similarities and differences with respect to other regions. They also explore changes in schools and educational systems, as well as the phenomenon of the internal and external child and family migration.

This book explores the socially and individually determined nature of media literacy, addressing the central question of how individuals' media activity can be explained and evaluated. It examines people's media activity through the relationship between their competence to act and actual actions. Further, the book discusses the social factors that foster self-determined media activity, including people's abilities and skills and the associated knowledge that facilitates such skills, from the perspectives of various social science disciplines. Lastly, it applies these theoretical reflections to two empirical studies. Overall, this book provides a fundamental introduction to theories of media socialization, media literacy and media competence, and to the relation between media and socialization. It analyses international discourses on children, media, media literacy, and digital literacy. This book is of interest to scholars and researchers in the field of media studies, including media sociology and media education, communication, and cultural studies.

This expansive reference examines the many types of Family Life Education (FLE) programs being offered around the world, reflecting a myriad of cultures and contexts. Coverage identifies core FLE content areas including parenting education, human sexuality, and interpersonal relationships, and details their programming in various countries over six continents, the Caribbean, and the Middle East. Contributors discuss complex challenges of program design, implementation, and evaluation, as well as connections between FLE and family prevention and intervention services. This knowledge is of great theoretical and practical utility across various fields, and is of particular interest to those developing programs for diverse populations. This unique volume: Presents in-depth information on Family Life Education programs from different countries around the world. Discusses how the socio-historic, political, and economic context of a country impacts its families and family services and programs. Covers current topics including poverty, domestic violence, and immigration. Encourages best practices and thorough understanding of the country/region. Offers recommendations for family service providers. Global Perspectives on Family Life Education is a trove of vital knowledge benefitting scholars and researchers as well as professors, postgraduates, graduate and undergraduate students, and practitioners in the family sciences, family life education, family therapy, social work, child and family studies, psychology, sociology, social work, cultural studies, and urban studies.

The ageing of our population is a key societal issue across the globe. Although people are living longer, they need to be living longer in good health to continue to enjoy quality of life and independence and to prevent rises in health and social care costs. This timely and ground-breaking volume will provide an up-to-date overview of the factors that promote physical activity in later life. Despite advances in the fields of gerontology and geriatrics, sports and exercise science, sociology, health psychology, and public health, knowledge is largely contained within disciplines as reflected in the current provision of academic texts on this subject. To truly address the present and substantial societal challenges of population ageing, a multidisciplinary and collaborative approach is required. This handbook will inform researchers, students, and practitioners on the current evidence base for what physical activities need to be promoted among older people and how they can be implemented to maximise engagement. This handbook will be an invaluable resource for researchers, practitioners, policy makers, and students across the social sciences.

The present book aims to examine how sexual selection works in the human species. Almost all scholarly effort focuses on sexual selection in non-human species and extrapolates the findings to the human one. However, human mating has a unique pattern not found in any other species, namely parental influence over mate choice. Across preindustrial societies, the typical pattern of long-term mating is arranged marriage, where parents choose spouses for their children. By doing so, parents effectively become a sexual selection force. Traits that enhance an individual's chance to be selected as a son- or a daughter-in-law confer important reproductive advantages to those who are endowed with them, increasing in frequency in the population. The author has coined the term parental choice to describe the sexual selection force that arises from parental control over mating. He synthesizes extensive theoretical and empirical work in order to understand and model this force. The aim is to understand which factors give rise to parental choice and to combine these insights into constructing a more formal model. It also aims to further examine whether the predictions of the model fit the patterns of mating found across different types of human societies, and how the model can be used to understand the evolution of behavioral traits involved in mating. By synthesizing the various arguments put forward and published across the literature, the book offers a comprehensive argument and overview of an aspect of sexual selection unique to our species. Furthermore, the book revises and extends previously made arguments and models, while it provides useful insights on how the proposed revision of sexual selection theory can enable us to understand a wide range of human behavioral phenomena. It should be key reading for those interested in studying sexual selection in general and in the Homo sapiens species in particular.

With dual-working households now the norm, Food, Families and Work is the first comprehensive study to explore how families negotiate everyday food practices in the context of paid employment. As the working hours of British parents are among the highest in Europe, the United Kingdom provides a key case study for investigating the relationship between parental employment and family food practices. Focusing on issues such as the gender division of foodwork, the impact of family income on diet, family meals, and the power children wield over the food they eat, the book offers a longitudinal view of family routines. It explores how the everyday meanings of food change as children grow older and negotiate changes in their own lives and those of their family members. Drawing on extensive quantitative data from large-scale surveys of food and diet - as well as qualitative evidence - to emphasise the larger global context of social and economic change and shifting patterns of family life, Rebecca O'Connell and Julia Brannen present a holistic overview of food practices within busy contemporary family lives. Featuring perspectives from both parents and children, this innovative approach to some of the most hotly-debated topics in food studies is a must-read for students and scholars in food studies, sociology, anthropology, nutrition and public health.

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"Illuminating cultural study of single motherhood. . . . [Juffer] explores the experiences of single mothers across various social and economic conditions, taking a critical look at current social policy."
--"Library Journal"

"Juffer points to a new formation--the domestic intellectual--and in that gesture opens up the concept of the intellectual to a more complicated theoretical engagement. With it, she re-imagines marriage, mothering, and the spatial dynamics of private life, and returns them to a possibly radical and liberatory space. This powerful and transformative work adds to our understanding of the value of learning from ordinary life."
--Wahneema Lubiano, Duke University

Long perceived as the ultimate symbol of social breakdown and sexual irresponsibility, the single mother is now, in the context of welfare-to-work policies, often hailed as the new spokesperson for hard work and self-sufficiency. A dozen years after Dan Quayle denounced the television character Murphy Brown for making the decision to become a single mother "just another lifestyle choice," President George W. Bush applauded single mothers for "heroic work," and positive on-screen representations of single mothers abound, from "The Gilmore Girls" to "Sex and the City" to "American Idol,"

Single Mother describes the recent cultural valorization of this figure that--in the midst of demographic changes in the U.S.--has emerged as the unlikely heroic and seductive voice of the new American family. Drawing on her own life as a single mother, interviews with dozens of other single mothers, cultural representations, and policies on welfare, immigration, childcare, and child custody, Juffer analyzes this contingent acceptance of single mothers. Finally, critiquing the relentless emphasis on self-sufficiency to the exclusion of community, Juffer shows the remarkable organizing skills of these new mothers of invention. At a moment when one-third of all babies are born to single moms, Single Mother is a fascinating and necessary examination of these new "domestic intellectuals."

A highly informative account of trends, concepts, and problems related to dating and sexuality in the United States, along with thought-provoking coverage of today's most important issues and controversies. A history of dating and sexuality illuminates new trends and problems that were absent just a few decades ago. The most important dating and sexuality issues facing teenagers today are explored, including solutions and implications for educational intervention. The work elucidates how dating unfolds and how sexual attitudes and behaviors impact intimacy. Valuable information about organizations and individuals as well as print and electronic resources are included in this authoritative work. 32 biographical profiles describing the research of respected contributors to the fields of dating, sexuality, adolescent development, and family life A lively and engaging timeline chronicling the historic events that shaped dating and sexuality in America, such as the birth of the drive-in movie theater, the pill, the sexual revolution, MTV, HIV/AIDS, the Internet, and Viagra

Lone parenthood is an increasing reality in the 21st century, reinforced by the diffusion of divorce and separation. This volume provides a comprehensive portrait of lone parenthood at the beginning of the XXI century from a life course perspective. The contributions included in this volume examine the dynamics of lone parenthood in the life course and explore the trajectories of lone parents in terms of income, poverty, labour, market behaviour, wellbeing, and health. Throughout, comparative analyses of data from countries as France, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Germany, Belgium, Sweden, Switzerland, Hungary, and Australia help portray how lone parenthood varies between regions, cultures, generations, and institutional settings. The findings show that one-parent households are inhabited by a rather heterogeneous world of mothers and fathers facing different challenges. Readers will not only discover the demographics and diversity of lone parents, but also the variety of social representations and discourses about the changing phenomenon of lone parenthood. The book provides a mixture of qualitative and quantitative studies on lone parenthood. Using large scale and longitudinal panel and register data, the reader will gain insight in complex processes across time. More qualitative case studies on the other hand discuss the definition of lone parenthood, the public debate around it, and the social and subjective representations of lone parents themselves. This book aims at sociologists, demographers, psychologists, political scientists, family therapists, and policy makers who want to gain new insights into one of the most striking changes in family forms over the last 50 years. This book is open access under a CC BY License.

This book breaks new theoretical ground by constructing a framework of 'relational vulnerability' through which it analyses the disadvantaged position of those who undertake unpaid caregiving, or 'dependency-work', in the context of the private family. Expanding on existing socio-legal scholarship on vulnerability and resilience, it charts how the state seeks to conceal the embodied and temporal reality of vulnerability and dependency within the private family, while promoting an artificial concept of autonomous personhood that exposes dependency-workers work to a range of harms. The book argues that the legal framework governing the married and unmarried family reinforces principles of individualism and rationality, while labelling dependency-work as a private, gendered, and sentimental endeavor, lacking value beyond the family. It also considers how the state can respond to relational vulnerability and foster resilience. It seeks to provide a more comprehensive understanding of resilience, theorising its normative goals and applying these to different hypothetical state responses.

This contributed volume applies cliometric methods to the study of family and households in order to derive global patterns and determine their impact on economic development. Family and households are a fundamental feature of societies and economies. They are found throughout history and are the place where key decisions on fertility, labour force participation, education, consumption are made. This is especially relevant for the position of women. The book gathers key insights from a variety of fields - economics, history, demography, anthropology, biology - to shed light on the relation between family organisation and the long-term process of economic development.

The Caribbean is known more as a tropical paradise than as an area composed of diverse ethnic and political groups, the majority of whom live on the edge of poverty. This set of conceptual and empirical papers focuses on the diversity of ethnic groups in Caribbean families. The essays examine ethnic origins, social structures, family structures, and intellectual, social and clinical problems and their treatment. The issues noted in migration patterns are presented in some detail and there is a description and assessment of different family organizations and childrearing patterns. In documenting Caribbean culture, this volume aims to offer a source of information for broadening the knowledge base of social scientists interested in sociocultural family functioning.

This book investigates the life trajectories of Generation X and Y Australians through the 1990s and 2000s. The book defies popular characterizations of members of the 'precarious generations' as greedy, narcissistic and self-obsessed, revealing instead that many of the members of these generations struggle to reach the standard of living enjoyed by their parents, value learning highly and are increasingly concerned about the environment and the legacy current generations are leaving for their children and remain optimistic in the face of considerable challenges. Drawing on data from the Life Patterns longitudinal study of Australian youth (an internationally recognized study), the book tells the story of members of these 'precarious generations'. It examines significant dimensions of young people's lives across time, comparing how domains such as health and well-being, education, work and relationships intersect to produce the complex outcomes that characterize the lives of members of each of these generations. It also explores the strategies these generations use to make their lives and the ways in which they remain resilient. While the book is based on Australian data, the analysis draws on and contributes to the international literature on young people and social change.