Will the European Union have its Asingle family - a AEuropean family - as it will have a single currency? This is the question at the origin of this book. Studies of family behavior and the organization of private life among European citizens, as well as of family member social status (children in relation to adults/parents, women in relation to men), and of social functions of the family, for example social reproduction, reveal so much convergence among European families that the reality of a AEuropean family seems inevitable, and more so if one looks at foreign studies done - in Australia, the United States or Japan - of the family in Europe. However, studies of the different judicial and public policy laws in the different European Union member countries lead one to refine this first impression. The family does not have the same legal meaning in all places, and the ways in which it is defined by law and public policy continue to differ strongly, due in particular to historical factors, cultural traditions, and conceptions of the role of the State. In order for the family to be part of the construction of a European citizenship, the pluralistic nature of its political definitions will have to be recognized. Putting the family into the context of evolving European integration has never been done before. It was made possible in this study thanks to the joint efforts of two editors with long experience in social science studies of the family and as expert advisors to the European Commission, and by the work of the best international specialists in the field. This is a book intended for specialists working in the social sciences, for social and government policy-makers in the fields offamily and social policy, and for all those interested in European integration.

In the Book of Ezra-Nehemiah, Ezra commands Yehudite men to put away their foreign wives to avoid further defiling the 'holy seed'. What is the meaning of this warning? Are Ezra's words to be understood as a concern about race-mixing or is it emblematic of some more complex set of problems prevalent in the fledgling postexilic community? Ezra's words, with their seemingly racialized thinking, have been influential in much political, religious and popular culture in the USA. It has been a backdrop for constructing racial reality for centuries, melding seemingly biblical ideologies with accepted European Enlightenment-era ideas about racial superiority and inferiority. Willa Johnson combines archaeological data with social-scientific theory to argue for a new interpretation. In this anthropological and narratological analysis, Johnson views Ezra's edict in the light of ancient Yehudite concerns over ethnicity, gender, sexuality and social class following the return from exile. In this context, she argues, the warning against intermarriage appears to be an effort to reconstitute identity in the aftermath of the cataclysmic political dominance by first the Babylonian and then the Persian empires. This book represents a postmodern interdisciplinary approach to understanding an ancient biblical socio-political situation. As such, it offers fresh perspectives on ways that interpretations of the Bible continue to reflect the ideologies of its interpreters.

Global Perspectives on Well-Being in Immigrant Families addresses how immigrant families and their children cope with the demands of a new country in relation to psychological well-being, adjustment, and cultural maintenance. The book identifies cultural and contextual factors that contribute to well-being during a family s migratory transition to ensure successful outcomes for children and youth. In addition, the findings presented in this book outline issues for future policy and practice including preventive practices that might allow for early intervention and increased cultural sensitivity among practitioners, school staff, and researchers. "

"In "Breaking The Bonds," Merril Smith establishes the ambitious goal of determining 'what kind of problems arose in troubled marriages' and of analyzing 'how men and women coped with marital discord.' . . . To accomplish this, Smith studied hundreds of divorce petitions, other legal documents, newspapers, almshouse dockets, and prescriptive literature. She concludes that, as in the present day, married couples fought and parted over sex, money, and abuse."
--"Pennsylvania History"

"A richly textured study. . . With an eye to cross-class and cross-race representation, Smith utilizes diverse sources, including memoirs and diaries, correspondence, probate records, newspaper advertisements, depositions and petitions for divorce, and various moral reform and social regulatory organization records. . . . A brave attempt to write a description of 'the development of the Puritan concept of spirtiual growth.' . . . Gracefully written. . . provides specific new insights into a too-neglected area of early republican domestic politics."
--"William and Mary Quarterly"

The late eighteenth century marked a period of changing expectations about marriage: companionship came to coexist as a norm alongside older patriarchal standards, men and women began to see their roles in more disparate ways, expectations about the satisfaction of marriage grew, and gender distinctions between husbands and wives became more complicated. Marital strife was an inevitable outcome of these changing expectations. The difficulties that rose, including abuse, a lack of sexual communication, and domestic violence (frequently brought on by alcholism) differ little from those with which couples struggle today.

"Breaking The Bonds" is an imaginative and original account that brings to light a strongly communicative world in which neighbors knew of, dinscussed, and even came to the aid of those locked in unhappy marriages.

Through an exploration of key women writers of the early modern period, Marion Wynne-Davies demonstrates the ways in which female authors were both enabled and constrained by the writing traditions and influences within their families. The engagement with and participation in the construction of individual familial discourses is explained via an analysis of six Renaissance families: the Mores, Lumleys, Sidneys/Herberts, Carys and Cavendishes. While the book addresses the writings of male authors from these family groups, such as Sir Thomas More, John Donne, Philip Sidney, Lucius Cary and William Cavendish, its primary focus is on Margaret More/Roper, Gertrude More, Jane Lumley, Mary Wroth, Elizabeth Cary and Jane, Elizabeth and Margaret Cavendish.

Love presents itself as a complex, multidimensional phenomenon that has been considered one of the most intense and powerful of all human emotions. This book is a comprehensive compilation, analysis, and evaluation of existing views and theories about love development, maintenance, and dissolution.

Part I introduces a proposed psychosemantic paradigm and its two love-specific models as a common theoretical framework for evaluating the major theories regarding love and intimate relationships. Part II presents 21 love formation and development theories organized under seven paradigms for evaluation: personality attribution, introspective approach, psychophysiology, behavioral reinforcement, comparative/cognitive judgment, psychometric development, and structural components. Part III presents theories of love maintenance and conflict (a family system paradigm and its member approaches), love and marriage dissolution, and theological perspectives on human love and intimate relations. Part IV introduces a common methodological framework for generating a summative evaluation, in terms of major strengths and weaknesses, of contemporary love theorizations. It also suggests future directions for developing love studies as a comprehensive, multidisciplinary scientific discipline.

Caregiving role rather than gender has a predominant influence on parent interaction in nonstressful as well as stressful situations. Primary caregiving fathers can competently assume caregiving and nurturant functions so as to become their infants' primary attachment figures.

Based on videotaped home observations, Dr. Geiger examines the unique and interactive effects of the gender of the caregiver and the primacy of the caregiver role on parent-infant interaction. Dr. Geiger observed 56 parents of different gender (father-mother) and caregiving role (primary-secondary) interacting with their infant in a non-stressful situation. Then infants were placed under stress in a modified version of the Strange Situation. A gender X caregiving role analysis of variance indicated no gender or role effect for parents' and infants' affiliative behaviors under nonstressful conditions except for fathers' rough tumble play. A caregiving role and/or a gender X role interaction effect was observed on the attachment behaviors of parents (caregiving and displaying affection) and of infants (displaying affection, clinging, moving away, and exploring). Infants' play interaction was most synchronous with that of primary caregiving fathers. Finally, the caregiver role effect indicated on all infants' attachment behaviors under stress showed a distinctive preference for primary caregivers (fathers or mothers) with disregard for gender.

Dr. Geiger's study indicates that primary caregiving fathers can be as competent as primary and secondary caregiving mothers. They were more affectionate, and despite an increased amount of assumed caregiving and household chores, primary caregiving fathers were more involved and in greater synchrony with their infant's play activities than primary or secondary caregiving mothers. This study challenges sex-role stereotypes and suggests benefits of modeling a more egalitarian upbringing. It presents strategies to resolve the dilemma of day care for infants. This book will be of great interest to students, scholars, and other researchers involved with early childhood education, socioemotional development of children, and developmental psychology, especially once it is acknowledged that father care in the home for infants less than one year of age has become the most common form of primary nonmaternal care arrangement (21.6%) adopted by employed mothers.

The systems approach to the family is based on the assumptions that there is equality between men and women in the family, and that women and men are treated equally in clinical practice. The contributors to this book challenge these hidden assumptions, discussing the issues from both a conceptual and clinical viewpoint. They argue strongly that questions of gender and power should be central to family therapy training and practice.

This textbook uses cases in family law to illustrate both traditional philosophical problems in the law as well as problems that are unique to family law. In the beginning chapters family law cases are employed to introduce the reader to philosophical debates about the relationship between law and morals, about how one ought to interpret the U.S. Constitution and its amendments, about the conditions under which individual liberty is justifiably limited by law, about the justification of punishment, and about the justification of remedies and standards of care in determining negligence in tort cases. Later chapters are devoted to contemporary issues unique to family law, including justifiable limits of access to marriage, alternatives to marriage, the rights of children, child custody disputes involving surrogate births, quasi-property disputes involving custody of frozen embryos, and the justifiable limits of the right not to procreate. The book reflects current movements, contemporary debates, and recent research on the philosophical problems in family law.

Grounded in the Foucauldian literature on governmentality and drawing on a broad range of disciplines, this book examines the government of childhood in the West from the early modern period to the present. The book deals with three key time-periods and examines shifts in the conceptualization and regulation of childhood and child-rearing.

Since the publication of the Coleman report in the US many decades ago, it has been widely accepted that the evidence that schools are marginal in the grand scheme of academic achievement is conclusive. Despite this, educational policy across the world remains focused almost exclusively on schools. With contributions from such figures as Jeanne Brooks-Gunn, Doris Entwistle and Richard Arum this book is an important contribution to a debate that has implications across the board in social sciences and policy-making. It will be required reading for students and academics within sociology, economics and education and should also find a place on the bookshelves of education policy-makers.

This book examines the role governments play in managing policy challenges such as religion, romance, gender relations, same-sex marriages and privacy protection in response to social changes in marriage. Elizabeth van Acker asks whether governments can or should intervene in this personal sphere.

Parenting is always a vital and challenging task. Even more vital and challenging is the task of parenting a child with a disability. When there is more than one child in the family, all parents want to share their time, energy, and love with all their children--and all siblings sometimes wonder if they are being treated fairly. When one child in a family has a disability, all this becomes more complex. Parents and sisters and brothers often feel that for them, It isn't fair.

Selected and compiled from two decades of The Exceptional Parent magazine, "It Isn't Fair " reveals first-hand the myriad feelings of normal brothers and sisters at all stages as they grapple with caretaking, frustration, powerlessness, jealousy, guilt, and worry about their special siblings. Breaking the wall of silence that deference has imposed on their experiences, here are the siblings of the child with autism, the child injured at birth, the child institutionalized after many years at home. Parents offer their own experiences and perspectives on their children, and they illustrate the importance of sharing information within the family. The editors also include professional commentary.

Originally published in 1990, this book met the rising interest in the subject of women in pre-industrial England, bringing together a group of scholars with diverse and wide-ranging interests; experts in social and medical history, demography, women's studies, and the history of the family, whose work would not normally appear in one volume. Key aspects of motherhood in pre-industrial society are discussed, including women's concepts of maternity, the experience of pregnancy, childbirth, and wet nursing, the fostering and disciplining of children, and child abandonment and neglect. This unique book provides a comprehensive introductory overview of its subject, with emphasis on women's experiences and motives.

The Family in Late Antiquity offers a challenging, well-argued and coherent study of the family in the late Roman world and the influence of the emerging Christian religion on its structure and value. Before the Roman Empire's political disintegration in the west, enormous political, religious and cultural changes took place in the period of late antiquity. This book is the first comprehensive study of the family in the later Roman Empire, from approximately 300 AD to 550 AD. Geoffrey Nathan analyses the classical Roman family as well as early Christian notions of this most basic unit of social organisation. Using these models as a contextual backdrop, he then explores marriage, children, domestic servitude, and other familial institutions in late antiquity. He brings together a diverse collection of sources, transcending traditional studies that have centred on the legal record.

Why do mantelpieces matter? As everyday 'focal points', they offer a unique way into understanding how what matters relates to who matters. Wide-ranging, original, innovative research assembles Mass Observation Archive material with historiographies of family, house and nation from ancient Greece to present-day Europe, China and America. Entwined with insightful ethnography of British domestic and heritage practices, these studies elicit how power works in the small spaces of home. Accompanied by films made with asylum seekers and participants' 'photo-calendars', it is an engaging, effective fusion of different modes of analysis, with imaginative theorising and auto-biographical reflection. This cutting-edge contribution to current debates on identity unfolds how dominant cultural values not only exclude the dispossessed, but also limit possibilities for future networks of shared hope, loss and vulnerability.

The Revolutionary Art of Love: From Romantic Love to Global Compassion offers a complex description of love as a personal emotion and as an intersubjective, ethical experience of connection. Its purpose is to deconstruct cultural myths about love, proposing instead a framework for understanding love's contribution to the well-being of individuals and social systems. The uniqueness of the book lies in its interdisciplinary scope, articulating love as a form of connection to the self, others, and the world in general. It examines its role in mental health, sexuality, emotional intelligence, and social responsibility. Bianca Briciu's bold new book is an invitation to reclaim the power of the human heart from institutional constraints by redefining love as a complex human capability, similar to intelligence or creativity. The cultivation of love opens us to the ethics of interconnectedness and responsibility of caring for life. Framing love as a revolutionary art articulates the subtleties of different experiences of love as expressions of an insufficiently explored human capability with transformative potential.

Stories and storytelling are one of the primary ways that families and family members make sense of both everyday and difficult events, create a sense of individual and group identity, remember, connect generations, and establish guidelines for family behavior. With so many important functions, storytelling is a significant but still understudied communicative process for the family.

Family Storytelling focuses on the ways in which stories are told in and about family in order to provide insight into the processes, functions, and consequences of family storytelling. This collection of empirical articles illuminates various ways in which family storytelling affects and reflects the negotiation of individual and relational identity in the family, teaches important family lessons, and helps members make sense of and cope with difficulty. Each of these functions is explored through both scientific and interpretive investigations, thus showcasing the contributions that research on family storytelling from different paradigms make to our understanding of the family.

This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Family Communication.

First published in 1984, this groundbreaking title explores the concept of fatherhood, by following a hundred men who become fathers for the first time. The book is addressed to men who are discovering fatherhood and to women who wish to hear what a man feels and thinks about having a child. Many men experience the strange problems of the male couvade. They have everything from mysterious back ache to inexplicable stomach pains. Later they frequently find that the white-coated professionals shut the door on their doubts and needs and their shy search for information. Brian Jackson's book cautiously explores changing attitudes to fatherhood emerging at the time of the book's initial publication. In recent years we have gone through a unique revolution in man's experience of woman and child. There is surprise at the costs and demands of parenthood, so much so that both parents may move from a honeymoon phase of parenthood into the birth of the blues. Previously this has been thought of as a female, hormonal readjustment, but since men speak of identical symptoms, this study suggests that, at the roots, lies the strain of unprepared parenthood. The traditional father is still there - showing off his medals, his tattoos, his rugby triumphs and his unconcern for the gentler aspects of life. So is the man who simply hunts in the economic jungle, and expects his home to service him. But most of these men now waver and hedge their bets. They look at their child as they return from their working day, or as they slump into unemployment, and wonder if they could be more positive, more creative, more licensed to care.

Using actual case studies, as well as examples from music, literature, and film, Dr. Pittman identifies four basic patterns of infidelity the accidental encounter, habitual philandering, marital arrangements, and romance discussed how to limit the damage that affairs do, and offers practical suggestions on how to make a marriage work."

Motherhood is the focus of much public scrutiny, situated as it seems to be at the frontier of processes of social order and change. Much has been written about the difficulties of mothering in a context of ever-expanding expert advice, as well as apparently increasing expectations that the mother-child bond be cultivated through intensive care-giving. This study returns to neglected sociological questions concerning the connections between agency and normative complexity, through the pragmatist interpretation it offers of the recognition dynamics shaping this deeply contested and emotionally fraught role. Drawing on qualitative interviews with forty mostly middle-class mothers across the UK and US, this book offers a three-party typology of the coping strategies women adopt. The various combinations of expressivism, instrumentalism and pragmatism taken up by respondents as they go about asserting normative authority and seeking esteem for the competence and quality of their mothering, provides the focus of attention.

While marriages were supposed to be celebrated publicly by priests, in churches where the parties were known, many couples had reasons -- among them parental disapproval, religious nonconformity, property considerations and previous entanglements -- to marry in other ways. Nor was this difficult where there was no unified marriage code, where a simple exchange of vows might constitute a valid marriage, and where unbeneficed priests were prepared to perform the ceremony in return for a drink.
Clandestine marriage had represented a problem to the church and state, and to the rights of property, since the middle ages, eluding a variety of attempts to control it. By the eighteenth century it had become a scandal, with Fleet parsons marrying thousands of couples a year. In 1753 Lord Hardwicke's Marriage Act nullified such irregular marriages, only to drive them to adopt other guises until the introduction of civil marriage in 1836.
In this intriguing book Brian Outhwaite explores the nature and scale of clandestine marriage. He describes why it attracted so many customers and why it was so hard to suppress. "Clandestine Marriage in England, 1500-1850" provides a new perspective on a central social and religious institution.

Parenting in England is the first study of the world of parenting in late Georgian England. The author, Joanne Bailey, traces ideas about parenthood in a Christian society that was responding to new cultural trends of sensibility, romanticism and domesticity, along with Enlightenment ideas about childhood and self. All these shaped how people, from the poor to the genteel, thought about themselves as parents, and remembered their own parents. With meticulous attention to detail, Bailey illuminates the range of intense emotions provoked by parenthood by investigating a rich array of sources from memoirs and correspondence, to advice literature, fiction, and court records, to prints, engravings, and ballads. Parenting was also a profoundly embodied experience, and the book captures the effort, labour, and hard work it entailed. Such parental investment meant that the experience was fundamental to the forging of national, familial, and personal identities. It also needed more than two parents and this book uncovers the hitherto hidden world of shared parenting. At all levels of society, household and kinship ties were drawn upon to lighten the labours of parenting. By revealing these emotional and material parental worlds, what emerges is the centrality of parenthood to mental and physical well-being, reputation, public and personal identities, and to transmitting prized values across generations. Yet being a parent was a contingent experience adapting from hour to hour, year to year, and child to child. It was at once precarious, as children and parents succumbed to fatal diseases and accidents, yet it was also enduring because parent-child relationships were not ended by death: lost children and parents lived on in memory.

This book brings together recent UK studies into children's experiences and practices around food in a range of contexts, linking these to current policy and practice perspectives. It reveals that food works not only on a material level as sustenance but also on a symbolic level as something that can stand for thoughts, feelings, and relationships. The three broad contexts of schools, families and care (residential homes and foster care) are explored to show the ways in which both children and adults use food. Food is used as a means by which adults care for children and is also something through which adults manage their own feelings and relationships to each other which in turn impact on children's experiences. The book examines the power of food in our daily lives and the way in which it can be used as a medium by individuals to exert power and resistance, establish collective identities and notions of the self and to express moralities about notions of 'proper' family routines and 'good' and 'healthy' lifestyle choices. It identifies inter-generational and intra-generational differences and commonalities in regard to the uses of and experiences around food across a range of studies conducted with children and young people. This book was published as a special issue of Children's Geographies.

ATTRIBUTIONS, ACCOUNTS AND CLOSE RELATIONSHPIS documents attributional and accounts approaches to the study of close relationships. Issues of focus include communication pro- blems in marriage and their relationship with causal attri- butions; marital violence and its relationship with early learning experience; ego-defensive attribution and excuse- making in couples and with respect to medical problems; and attributions about transitions in relationships.