Starting with questions about how to incorporate Chinese culture and custom into the lives of their adopted daughters Emily and Claire, the authors began a year-long search for answers. The result is a detailed examination of the post-adoptive views, actions, and experiences of a national sample of families with children from China toward acknowledging their adopted child's Chinese cultural-heritage and the issues they face together as a multicultural family. Historical and present-day issues affecting intercountry adoptees and their families, such as arguments used to support or oppose intercountry and transracial adoption, developmental delay and the effects of institutionalization on Chinese adoptees, parent-child attachment, discrimination and racial prejudice, and identity development, are detailed. Parents' beliefs and experiences on these issues are supplemented by a multi-disciplined, comprehensive review of available literature. While occasionally relying on personal experiences, this book is not about the authors' personal adoption story and parenting experiences. Rather, the focus is on common experiences and reactions of adoptive families who were, for the most part, firmly ensconced in the cultural mainstream but now find themselves viewed differently by society; these parents find that issues of culture, race, and ethnicity have become an important part of their everyday lives. Adoption scholars and professionals, as well as adoptive parents, will benefit from reading Intercountry Adoption from China.

Volume 15 of "Sociological Studies of Children and Youth" investigates the interactional procedures used by children and young people as disputes arise in varying contexts of their everyday life. Disputes are a topic of angst and anxiety for children, young people and adults alike, and yet are important times for interactional matters to be addressed. A particular intention of the book is its ethnomethodological focus, bringing a fine-grained analysis and understanding to disputes and related interactional matters. Such analysis highlights the in situ competency of children and young people as they manage their social relationships and disputes to offer insight into how children arrange their social lives within the context of school, home, neighbourhood, correctional, club and after school settings. This volume offers a contemporary understanding of the relational matters of children's peer cultures to better understand and address the complex nature of children and young people's everyday lives in today's society. Papers include: when verbal disputes get physical; conditional threats in young children's peer interaction; and young children's disputes during computer game playing.

Throughout the postwar period, changes in individual behaviour and legal reforms have transformed traditional notions of family life throughout Western Europe. However, interpretations of what constituted a desirable family life varied, together with the type of social intervention adopted towards it. Taking Britain and Italy as comparative cases, the author explores the extent to which dominant notions of family life differed in postwar Britain and Italy and the implications this had on the development of family policy in these two countries.

Family policy holds a particular status in the quest for a more equitable world as it intersects the rights of women, children, and workers. But despite local and global efforts and initiatives, the state of family policy in different areas of the world varies widely. Through a cross-section of countries on six continents, Family Policies Across the Globe offers the current state of the laws concerning family life, structure, and services, providing historical, cultural, and socioeconomic context. Lucidly written chapters analyze key aspects of family definition, marriage, child well-being, work/family balance, and family assistance, reviewing underlying social issues and controversies as they exist in each country. Details of challenges to implementation and methods of evaluating policy outcomes bring practical realities into sharp focus, and each chapter concludes with recommendations for improvement at the research, service, and governmental levels. The result is an important comparative look at how governments support families, and how societies perceive themselves as they evolve. Among the issues covered: Sierra Leone: toward sustainable family policies. Russia: folkways versus state-ways. Japan: policy responses to a declining population. Australia: reform, revolutions, and lingering effects. Canada: a patchwork policy. Colombia: a focus on policies for vulnerable families. Researchers , professors and graduate students in the fields of social policy, child and family studies, psychology, sociology, and social work will find in Family Policies Across the Globe a reference that will grow in importance as world events continue to develop.

Drawing on her long experience as an academic researcher and writer, Ann Oakley develops a sociology of the research process itself, telling the story of how a research project is undertaken and what happens during it, to both researchers and those who are researched. This remarkable book focuses on a topic of great importance in the provision of health services - caring and social support. Setting neglect of this topic in the wider context of an ongoing crisis in gendering knowledge, Social support and motherhood is now reissued for a contemporary audience. It has much resonance for social science researchers and others interested in the experiences of mothers, and in the relations between social research, academic knowledge and public policy.

This book is an introduction to the social anthropology of kinship - to the ways in which the peoples of different cultures marry and relate to each other within and outside the family, and to the means by which one generation relates to those that come before and after it. It is addressed in particular to students of anthropology, but is also intended as a one-volume guide to those, such as social historians, demographers and geographers, who find it necessary to understand patterns of kinship in different places and at different times.

The book is divided into two parts. Part I opens with a discussion of what kinship means to the social anthropologist as distinct from the biologist, and considers the different possible approaches to the subject within social anthropology itself. The following chapters cover topics such as descent, inheritance, succession, the family, residence, marriage, kinship terminology, systems of affinal alliance, the new reproductive technologies, and symbolic approaches to kinship.

In Part II the first four chapters provide an overview of theoretical debates concerning different aspects of kinship. The final chapter provides ethnographic examples, together with an annotated guide to further reading, divided by chapter.

The book applies and illustrates these concepts and topics to a number of contrasting case studies. These illustrate the insights that can be achieved from the study of kinship, and also show that the complexity of even the most familar kinship patterns rarely lends itself to simple description. The author also includes annotated guides to further reading.

Our consumer culture sets exacting standards and norms for what constitutes an ideal child. The tough realities of life often create children and child-bearing and rearing circumstances that are outside the ideal. How do women whose experiences don't match the norm cope and adapt? How do they make sense of it to themselves and to the world?

In a rich series of ethnographic case studies, Transformative Motherhood intimately conveys the experiences of women in the United States who, in each case, have reproductive encounters that do not match up to these cultural standards. From women who choose to become surrogate, foster, or adoptive mothers, to others who give birth to children with disabilities or who have had a pregnancy loss, all creatively meet the challenges posed by their particular mothering experiences. It is often the language of giving and getting, so prominent in a consumer culture, that these women use to make sense of their situation.

In the process, Transformative Motherhood redefines conventional understandings of motherhood, the mother/child relationship, and the role of biology and the law in determining what constitutes a family.

The contributors include Rayna Rapp, Helena Ragone, Judith A. Modell, Danielle Wozniak, Gail Landsman, and Linda L. Layne.

"This text opens up multiple possibilities for reading contemporary women as responsive speaking subjects involved in reconstructing and transferring meanings without consolidating or totalizing their outcomes."
--"Resources for Feminist Research, Winter/Spring 2001, Vol. 28, No. 3/4"

As globalization and transnational encounters intensify, people's mobility is increasingly conditioned by intimacy, ranging from love, desire, and sexual liaisons to broader family, kinship, and conjugal matters. This book explores the entanglement of mobility and intimacy in various configurations throughout the world. It argues that rather than being distinct and unrelated phenomena, intimacy-related mobilities constitute variations of cross-border movements shaped by and deeply entwined with issues of gender, kinship, race, and sexuality, as well as local and global powers and border restrictions in a disparate world.

In the first days of spring, birds undergo a spectacular metamorphosis. After a long winter of migration and peaceful coexistence, they suddenly begin to sing with all their might, varying each series of notes as if it were an audiophonic novel. They cannot bear the presence of other birds and begin to threaten and attack them if they cross a border, which might be invisible to human eyes but seems perfectly tangible to birds. Is this display of bird aggression just a pretence, a game that all birds play? Or do birds suddenly become territorial - and, if so, why? By attending carefully to the ways that birds construct their worlds and ornithologists have tried to understand them, Despret sheds fresh light on the activities of both and, at the same time, enables us to become more aware of the multiple worlds and modes of existence that characterize the planet we share in common with birds and other species.

According to the findings of this study, college women do not typically use drugs simply for the sake of taking drugs. Drug use was viewed as a part of relationships, and for some of these women, a very important part. Within their relationships, these women socially constructed drugs in traditional (i.e., using discourses of morality, legality, and health/personal safety) ways. They also tended to arrange drugs hierarchically--they created what the author labels an individualized drug acceptability ranking that helped them determine their drug using limits.

This study suggests that the decisions to use drugs are more complicated than previous literature has suggested. Studies attempting to find correlations between college student drug use, personality traits of drug abusers, gender differences, racial differences, parental influences and educational influences continue to dominate the literature on college student drug use. This book provides a starting point and an invitation to listen to more voices to determine other factors that influence one's drug using decisions.

Since 1997, child welfare services have been faced with new demands to engage fathers or develop father-inclusive services. This book emerges from work by the author as a researcher and educator over many years on the issues posed by this agenda for child welfare practitioners in a variety of contexts. In locating fathers, fathering and fatherhood within a historical and social landscape, the book addresses issues seldom taken up in practice settings. It explores diversity and complexity in fathering in different disciplines such as psychoanalysis, sociology and psychology and analyses contemporary developments in social policies and welfare practices.The author employs a feminist perspective to highlight the opportunities and dangers in contemporary developments for those wishing to advance gender equity. A key strength of the book is its inter-disciplinary focus. It will be required reading for students, graduate and post-graduate, of social work, social policy, sociology and child and family studies. Academic researchers will also find the book invaluable because of its breadth of scholarship.

This book describes children and youth on the one hand and parents on the other within the newly configured worlds of transnational families. Focus is put on children born abroad, brought up abroad, studying abroad, in vulnerable situations, and/or subject of trafficking. The book also provides insight into the delicate relationships that arise with parents, such as migrant parents who are parenting from a distance, elderly parents supporting migrant adult children, fathers left behind by migration, and Eastern-European parents in Nordic countries. It also touches upon life strategies developed in response to migration situations, such as the transfer of care, transnational (virtual) communication, common visits (to and from), and the co-presence of family members in each other's (distant) lives. As such this book provides a wealth of information for researchers, policy makers and all those working in the field of migration and with migrants. The chapter 'Afterword: Gender Practices in Transnational Families' is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license via link.springer.com.

Recent theorizing tends to position ordinary relationships as something we have lost, yet the nature of these relationships is not seriously engaged with. Drawing on rich empirical data, this book questions epochal claims about contemporary emotional lives, setting out to be explicit about the nature of ordinary relationships.

In this provocative history of parenting, Harry Hendrick analyses the social and economic reasons behind parenting trends. He shows how broader social changes, including neoliberalism, feminism, the collapse of the social-democratic ideal, and the 'new behaviourism', have led to the rise of the anxious and narcissistic parent.

Based on repeat interviews from a range of generational perspectives, this book explores the nature of contemporary British Chinese households and childhoods, examining the extent to which parents identify themselves as being Chinese and how decisions to uphold or move away from 'traditional' Chinese values impacts on their child-rearing methods.

This book addresses the complexity of family change. It draws on evidence from two linked studies, one carried out in the 1960s and the other in the early years of the 21st century, to analyse the specific ways in which family lives have changed and how they have been affected by the major structural and cultural changes of the second half of the twentieth century.The book shows that while there has undeniably been change, these changes have neither undermined family life, nor have they led to a large-scale transformation of family relations in the direction of greater equality. The book: presents a unique opportunity to chart the nature of social change in a particular locality over the last 50 years; includes discussions of social and cultural variations in family life, focusing on younger as well as older generations; explores not only what happens within family-households but also what happens within networks of kin across different households; and, explores the way changing patterns of employment affect kinship networks and how geographical mobility co-exists with the maintenance of strong kinship ties. The findings will be of interest to students of sociology, social anthropology, social policy, women's studies, gender studies and human geography at undergraduate and postgraduate level.

Marshalling her experience as an expert witness in court proceedings on non-consensual, confidential adoption in Israel, Mass describes legal proceedings following the Israeli state petition that declares children eligible for adoption because of alleged parental incapability, and explores the politics of state intervention in the parent/child relationship. The selected case studies present the testimonies of the children, the parents, the designated adoptive parents, and the state's representatives, as well as the author's own testimony.

This book is about how to trigger the capacity to aspire among black youth. Examining the transition out of adulthood and imagined futures of black youth, Maja helps us understand how black youth aspirations might be raised, and how a better future for young people can be achieved. Black Youth Aspirations tracks the journeys of nine black teenagers in South Africa, and how they navigate their way through the final two years of schooling. Maja explores and discovers the maps of the future that youths envision, and investigates how their immediate environments in and out of school serve as instruments that help them interpret, navigate, and manifest those aspirations. Presenting a new conceptual tool, OATS (Objects, Agency, Tools, and Spaces), seeks to provide practical meaning on how to best develop young people's capacity to aspire. Filling it gap in the scholarly literature, and digging deeper than the statistics ever could, this book is a dynamic interaction between research among youth and the application of concepts to make sense of their stories. As the first book that discusses the aspirational pathways of working class black youth in the context of the global south, the theoretical and research approaches on which the book is based make it an exciting and novel addition to the global literature in the area of youth studies.

Currently, families are being subjected to increasing public attention. Interest is focussing on their potential strengths and weaknesses in determining how well children do at school. Alongside such human-development oriented expectations, families are also becoming a focus of attention as a resource for human capital in times of economic crises and criticism of the welfare state. In many European countries, parents and children are at the forefront of the welfare state and socio-educational activities in current programs and policies. The current transformation processes in the welfare state are making the relationship between families and the state more dynamic in general, and they are structuring the discourses on the childrearing, education, and child care services in the fields of both public and private responsibility. The introduction of all-day schooling in Germany also has to be viewed in this context. This is gradually changing the traditional half-day structure of German schools and shifting the borders of public and private responsibility on the levels of education, child care, and childrearing institutions. The attention given to parental childrearing and educational responsibility within the context of current national and international debates clearly underlines the fact that issues in private life are increasingly entering the public discourse and becoming subject to attempts at socio-political control. This raises the assumption of an increasing politicization of parenthood in the (post) welfare state that is focusing more and more attention on the structural conditions of gainful employment and child care as well as on the current relations between the genders. This context particularly emphasizes the time and care regimes that decisively determine the practices in daily family life and the utilization of all-day education settings.

Nuclear family and kibbutz childrearing practices are compared from a Rawlsian perspective of justice. Based upon the kibbutz educational system, which has reinstituted the family, Geiger and Fischer propose a model of educational change for consideration in the United States. This model is designed to strengthen the nuclear family while improving the prospects of disadvantaged, anomic, and unattached youth.

Geiger and Fischer examine, within a Rawlsian perspective, several child-rearing institutions affecting children. Justice as fairness would consider a child-rearing institution and its inequalities as fair if there are no alternative arrangements under which the prospects of least-advantaged children could be improved. Among these least-advantaged children are those who are neglected, abused, and stripped of self-respect. As the nuclear family disintegrates, the authors ask whether it can fulfill its child-rearing function. Utilizing a self-report study conducted on socialization and delinquency in Israel as well as several other observational studies, the authors demonstrate that in a more egalitarian structure such as the kibbutz, least-advantaged children have more opportunities to develop into autonomous responsible individuals. For Americans, the kibbutz educational system shows new paths for change from nursery school through high school that would allow for greater bonds between the family, school, work, and the community. An emerging sense of community would also stimulate the moral and intellectual growth of disadvantaged youth. This book is recommended to researchers and policy makers in the areas of education, delinquency, and social welfare.

"One Day at a Time" is potentially a landmark text in understanding care provision needs of families in a changing social context. Its applied and holistic orientation reflects an exceptional level of experiential insight and of scholarship that should ensure both relevance and widespread appeal. This book not only provides readers with a practical theoretical framework, but also incorporates applications that are imaginative, and yet simple to implement. (From the Foreword by Dr. Otto von Mering and Dr. Leon Earle)

Dementia attacks not only the body, but in particular the mind and the very personhood of the patient. For family members, the alteration in the person's identity and the loss of a shared past and shared memories is devasting. The purpose of this book is to show how families go about day-to-day living with this condition. Le Navenec and Vonhof provide a holistic view of caring as a reciprocal relationship that involves all members of the family as well as their surrounding social network. The book is intended primarily for professionals, educators, and students in the fields of geriatrics, nursing, rehabilitation, social work, gerontology, family sociology, medical anthropology, and family therapy. Family members who are caring for an older person may also benefit from reading about the experiences of others.

Growing numbers of partners, parents, children, grandchildren and siblings are living far away from each other, yet their opportunities to stay in touch have never been greater. Smartphones, tablets and personal computers are used by parents in London to care for their children in the Philippines. Refugees use phones and international transfers to send money and support to parents overseas. Funerals, weddings and anniversaries prompt return visits by plane and are streamed online to kin around the world. The mechanisms and processes of globalization are transforming the ways in which people 'do' and think about their families. Families, Intimacy and Globalization examines their experiences, charting the tensions between the freedoms and choices of late modern individuals, on the one hand, and the constraints of relational ties of love and obligation, on the other, which produce the 'floating ties' of global families and intimate relationships. Using detailed examples from all corners of the globe and across the life course, from internet dating to parenting to aged care, this thought-provoking book examines the transformation of relationships by the processes of migration and the cultural and economic flows that are central to globalization.

Do adoptions provide children for families or families for children? This book analyzes the complex interactions between adopters and adoptees using historical and current data. Who are the preferred parents and children, both domestically and internationally? How do the types of adoptions-domestic adoptions, private and public through the foster care system, and intercountry adoptions-differ? Domestic trends include a shift to open adoptions and a notable increase in "hard to place," foster care adoptions-typically older, siblings, minorities, with physical, educational, or emotional challenges. Adoptive parents are increasingly all ages (including grandparents); all types of marriages (single, married and same-sex couples); all income levels, with subsidized adoptions for children who would otherwise remain in foster or institutional care. Intercountry adoptions have followed waves, pushed by wars and political or economic crises in the sending country, and pulled by the increasing demand from the U. S. Currently there is a decrease in intercountry adoptions from Asia and Eastern Europe with a possible fifth wave from Africa with the greatest number from Ethiopia. This is a resource for family sociologists, demographers, social workers, advocates for children and adoptive parents, as well as those who are interested in the continuing research in adoptions.

This volume is comprised of empirical research and theoretical papers within three key areas, namely children's well being, children and youth peer cultures, and the rights of children and youth. These empirical studies include children's voices and experiences from four continents (Asia, Europe, North America and South America) and a range of methodological and theoretical orientations. A clear connection to social policy at a national and international level is made in many of these studies. Topics are wide-ranging and include: Praetorian militarization; school mobility; math and reading achievement gaps; dating and the developmental discourse in a summer camp; and, school and social exclusion for urban young people. Altogether, these studies highlight how structure and culture both limit and enable the life chances of children, how children interpret and construct their social relations and environments, and how children view themselves as well as how others view the rights of children. This volume is a further example of how the "Sociological Studies of Children and Youth" series successfully showcases major strands of current thinking on children and youth in our world today.