This book explores the significance of sister relationships in women's lives. It documents sistering experiences through narratives of growing up, caring for the family, leaving home, and becoming a mother. Girls and women describe their emotions, shifting power dynamics, and moments of transition in their relationships. Drawing parallels between sistering and caring, the book presents new material on a widespread yet invisible aspect of the social construction of femininity. It also contributes to sociological debates about transformations in intimate ties.

There can be little doubt that ours is a society riding the crest of vast and profound social and economic change. The material conditions and social landscapes through which we experience our lives are increasingly an unchartered sea of unanticipated shift and hidden consequence and many of us have the unsettling feeling that we are out of our depth. It is natural to respond to this rapid and fundamental change with concern, particularly when many of the enduring keystones of our lives have been problematized. Family is one such keystone. Family-and its apparent decline-is a topic of great interest. The breakdown of marriage and other relationships, family roles and responsibilities, the alienation of children, the rights of grandparents, juvenile crime and drug usage, and the emotional fallout of divorce are all current and emotive issues. Few individuals remain untouched by this debate. The changes we are witnessing in relation to family are made all the more worrisome because we have a limited vocabulary for discussing and understanding profound change-a vocabulary characterized by normative framings and assumptions of deficit. It is very easy to look at the changes in 'traditional' family structure and read 'breakdown', 'decline' and 'loss'. A politics of blame and rhetoric of 'reconstitution' very quickly follows. However, given the fundamental nature of contemporary social and economic change, this is not an adequate response.

This ground-breaking work provides the first history of ideas about the sexual child in modernity. Beginning with twenty-first century panics about sexualization, the authors address why the sexual child excites such powerful emotions in the Anglophone west. Historical analysis of the past two centuries offers some challenging and insightful answers. Drawing on a wide range of different materials from enlightenment philosophy, medicine, social purity sexual hygiene, psychoanalysis and child development, this book illustrates that current panics have a consistent and fascinating history. Egan and Hawkes strive to progress beyond the current impasse of fear and anxiety.

This pivot provides a conceptual statement of an approach to understanding the interrelationships of work, leisure, and "chore" activities in daily life, and how they are managed in practice. Drawing on the sociology of everyday life, Stebbins puts forward the notion of Pondering Everyday Life (PEA), a thinking process/activity in which we routinely understand, coordinate, organize, remember, and compare our involvements in work, leisure, and non-work obligations. This perspective demonstrates how the interrelation between these three domains helps bring meaning and continuity to everyday life. As a micro- and meso-level conception that takes into account social, cultural and historic context, Stebbins contemplates how and what PEA can tell us about an individual's view of their own life. Pondering Everyday Life will be of interest to students and scholars across leisure studies, social psychology, and the sociology of leisure and work.

This book investigates the extent of gender inequality in the division of labor in the modern household. Through comparisons of the time allocations of single couple families without children, couple families with children and lone parents, a comprehensive account of the evolution of gender inequality over a typical lifecourse is presented.

This book defends the thesis that Kant's normative ethics and his practical ethics of sex and marriage can be valuable resources for people engaged in the contemporary debate over same-sex marriage. It does so by first developing a reading of Kant's normative ethics that explains the way in which Kant's notions of human moral imperfection unsocial sociability inform his ethical thinking. The book then offers a systematic treatment of Kant's views of sex and marriage, arguing that Kant's views are more defensible than some of his critics have made them out to be. Drawing on Kant's account of marriage and his conception of moral friendship, the book argues that Kant's ethics can be used to develop a defense of same-sex marriage.

This book focuses on families and their changes in Taiwan and China. Traditional notions of what constitutes a family have been changing in China, Taiwan and other Asian countries. The chapters in this book provide interesting methodological and substantive contributions to the discourse on family and social change in Chinese societies. They also underscore the implications of the various social changes in Chinese families. Written by Chinese and Western scholars, they provide an unprecedented overview of what is known about the effects of social change on Chinese families.

One might think that defining a family is an easy task because the family is so significant to society and is universal. The family is the first place we learn culture, norms, values, and gender roles. Families exist in all societies throughout the world; but their constitution differs. In the past several decades there have been many changes in the family in Taiwan and China. For instance, whereas in the West, we use a bilineal system of descent in which descent is traced through both the mother s side and the father s side of the family, in many parts of China, descent is patrilineal, although this is changing, and China and Taiwan are starting to assume a family constitution similar to that in the West. This and other issues are discussed in great detail in this book. Indeed it is the very nature of the differences that motivated the writing of this book on changing families in Taiwan and China.

The chapters in "Part I: The Family in Taiwan and China "focus on the basic family issues in Taiwan and China that provide the groundwork for many of the chapters that follow. Chapter 1 is about the distribution of resources in the family in Taiwan. Chapter 2 focuses on filial piety and the autonomous development of adolescents in the Taiwanese family, and Chapter 3 explores the important issue of family poverty in Taiwan. Chapter 4 moves away from Taiwan and looks at several issues of family growth and change in Hong Kong, noting the interesting similarities and differences between Hong Kong and China.

"Part II: Issues of Marriage, the Family and Fertility in Taiwan and China" focuses specifically on marriage, family and fertility. In Chapter 5 the authors discuss the relationships between marital status, socioeconomic status and the subjective well-being among women in Hong Kong and Taiwan. Chapter 6 describes patterns of sexual activity in China and the United States. Chapter 7 considers gender imbalances in Taiwan and their impact on the marriage market. Chapter 8 also focuses on Taiwan and examines the effects of mothers attitudes on daughters interaction with their mothers-in-law. Chapter 9 compares female and male fertility trends and changes in Taiwan.

"Part III: Children and the Family in East Asia and in Western Countries" consists of comparative studies of the family and children. Chapter 10 examines the dynamics of grandparents caring for children in China. Chapter 11 explores family values and parent-child interaction in Taiwan. Chapter 12 examines the significant amount of diversity among families in contemporary Taiwan. Chapter 13 describes adolescent development in Taiwan. Chapter 14 examines the impact of son preference on fertility in China, South Korea and the United States. And Chapter 15 explores the determinants of intergenerational support in Taiwan.

The final chapter in our book, the only chapter in "Part IV: The Family and the Future in Taiwan," examines the future of the family in Taiwan with respect especially to the marriage market and aged dependency."

In this innovative historical survey, Annegret S. Ogden addresses the need for the modern housewife to adapt to the additional role of wage earner. By examining a variety of diaries, letters, domestic fiction, and household books of the past two centuries, as well as solid statistical and historical data, she seeks not only to uncover the motivations and origins of the typical American housewife, but also to discover an alternative life pattern that has characterized a virtually unrecognized minority of American women. These are the immigrant, black, and frontier women, as well as any other part-time homemakers, who long ago forged the survival tools that are needed by today's majority of working housewives. It is Ogden's contention that an understanding of the historical housewife, as well as her working counterpart, will light the way for those modern American housewives who must adapt their role as both homemaker and wage earner to the shifting complexities of contemporary American life.

This book suggests that the enduring problem of generations remains that of knowledge: how society conceptualises the relationship between past, present and future, and the ways in which this is transmitted by adults to the young. Reflecting on Mannheim's seminal essay 'The Problem of Generations', the author explores why generations have become a focus for academic interest and policy developments today. Bristow argues that developments in education, teaching and parenting culture seek to resolve tensions of our present-day risk society through imposing an artificial distance between the generations. Bristow's book will be of interest to students and scholars in the fields of Sociology, Social Policy, Education, Family studies, Gerontology and Youth studies.

Why do so many Americans-working harder and longer and with less security than ever before-question the price of success demanded by today's hot-wired economy? Can you work and still have a life? Paula Rayman says, is yes. In this timely book, she offers a powerful blueprint for transforming the world of work, family, and community that is the downside of our relentlessly competitive culture. In this much-needed wake-up call to corporate America, Rayman shows why companies must go beyond the bottom line to survive and thrive. Drawing on her experience as a leading advocate for a more responsive workplace, she demonstrates how companies can organize for profit, productivity, and the desire of workers for a more rewarding quality of life. In a win-win agenda for changing outmoded organizations, she demonstrates convincingly that all successful transformations create workplaces that respect the need for dignity: security, self-respect, and the time and freedom to care for family and community.

Attachment-Based Social Work with Children and Adolescents is a wide-ranging look at attachment theory and research, its application to youth populations, and its natural fit with the social work profession. This book covers the applicability of attachment theory to the profession's various domains that include human behavior, practice, policy, research, and social work education. In particular, it addresses the broad spectrum of clinical social work, including practice in a variety of public and private settings and with a number of diverse populations. The book highlights the contribution of the social work profession to the development of attachment theory and research.

This book contextualizes how having a doula, or labor-support woman, present during childbirth results in lower rates of medical interventions. American women are inundated with views that childbirth is inherently risky, their bodies deficient, and therefore encouraged to accept the medicalized nature of childbirth resulting in high rates of unwarranted interventions that can pose significant risk in a normal pregnancy. Why is birthing with a doula different? The narratives in this book support the belief that doulas often question the high rates of medical interventions in childbirth, fundamentally lodging a critique about the medicalization of childbirth to the women they serve. These stories share a very different philosophy about childbirth; one where the female body is capable, resilient, and not normally requiring external medical intervention. Doulas enter into a care-provider relationship that focuses on the experience of the birth as something transformative, to be honored and centered on the woman's body in an active role in the process. Lastly, doulas model to their clients both love and advocacy because doulas believe that modeling these behaviors will translate as women become mothers through the process of childbirth.

Drawing on the writings of Foucault, this book explores the politics and power-dynamics of family life, examining how everyday obligations such as attending school, going to work and staying healthy are organized through the family. The book includes an essay by Foucault, Les desordres des familles , translated here in English for the first time.

Recently considerable interest has developed about the degree to which anthropological approaches to kinship can be used for the study of the long-term development of European history. From the late middle ages to the dawn of the twentieth century, kinship - rather than declining, as is often assumed - was twice reconfigured in dramatic ways and became increasingly significant as a force in historical change, with remarkable similarities across European society. Applying interdisciplinary approaches from social and cultural history and literature and focusing on sibling relationships, this volume takes up the challenge of examining the systemic and structural development of kinship over the long term by looking at the close inner-familial dynamics of ruling families (the Hohenzollerns), cultural leaders (the Mendelssohns), business and professional classes, and political figures (the Gladstones)in France, Italy, Germany, and England. It offers insight into the current issues in kinship studies and draws from a wide range of personal documents: letters, autobiographies, testaments, memoirs, as well as genealogies and works of art.

Using an innovative, action research approach, Margaret Vickers explores the lives of women who work full time while caring for a child with significant chronic illness or disability. She demonstrates that such women can be disconnected from those around them, overwhelmed with responsibility at home and work, and dealing with ongoing grief and anxieties while largely unsupported. On the other hand, there are narratives of survival, kindness and resilience. This qualitative study makes use of data poems, fictional diary entries, firsthand interviews, research reflections and constructed vignettes in conveying the life experiences of this group of women.

Westerners believe that love makes life worth living; that sex is a natural desire different in kind from love; and that only cynics reduce our love life to a calculation of economic or genetic factors. In this volume, essays explore these and other assumptions about the relationship between romantic love and sex. This represents the first interdisciplinary social science study of love and sex. Contributors ask and answer questions such as: Is love just sex idealized, or is it a transcendent and divine emotion? Is love a cultural construct that is shared by members of the same culture, or is it a matter of personal taste? What keeps promiscuous people from using condoms even when they know they are at risk? Are black professional men so "rare" that their conceptions of love and sex differ from those of white professional men? Are brutal sexual fantasies an exclusively male domain, and are they always excluded from love fantasies among "normal" adolescents? Is divorce a culturally induced response to evolutionary reproductive strategies that compel individuals to maximize their genetic legacy? Are marriages or relationships less satisfying or stable when an actual mate falls short of the fantasy of the ideal mate? Is there a universal core to love and sex that is camouflaged by other cultural norms such as modesty and sexual segregation? Is rape perceived as more "acceptable" when the rapist says he was motivated by "love"? What do cult movements and romantic love have in common? As they attempt to answer these and other questions, the authors extend our understanding of the variety of ways that love and sex are conceptualized, connected, or separated.

Service learning, as defined by the editors, is the generation of knowledge that is of benefit to the community as a whole. This seventh volume in the Outreach Scholarship book series contributes a unique discussion of how service learning functions as a critical cornerstone of outreach scholarship. The sections and chapters of this book marshal evidence in support of the idea that undergraduate service learning, infused throughout the curriculum and coupled with outreach scholarship, is an integral means through which higher education can engage people and institutions of the communities of this nation in a manner that perpetuate civil society. The editors, through this series of models of service learning, make a powerful argument for the necessity of "engaged institutions."

This book reviews broad social changes affecting youth development and the inconsistency of the legal system in updating its approach to adolescents' rights. Legal experts examine current adolescent protections and offer research-based proposals for revising laws that underserve or criminalize youth under the rubric of protection. Focusing on the key areas of technology and media, education, and personal relationships, chapters discuss legal responses to a range of challenges impacting young people, including sexual exploitation, the right to privacy, military family issues, and the school-to-prison pipeline. The book's nuanced concept of legal protection credits youth with greater competence than currently afforded, in hope that adolescents can take more ownership of their evolving lives in a rapidly changing society. Topics featured in this volume include: How to balance freedom of expression with adolescents' right to data protection. The sexualization of media and its effects on youth attitudes and behaviors. The rising phenomenon of teenage sexting. Protecting students' sexual identity in private schools. Youth sex and labor trafficking and possible solutions to alleviate the widespread crime. Adolescents, Rapid Social Change, and the Law is a must-have resource for researchers and professors, clinicians and related professionals as well as graduate students in developmental psychology, family studies, public health, educational policy and politics, and social policy.

Travelling intensively to and for work helps but also challenges people to find ways of balancing work and personal life. Drawing on a large European longitudinal study, Mobile Europe explores the diversity and ambivalence of mobility situations and the implications for family and career development.

Friendship and Educational Choice provides a unique insight into how young people go about making decisions about their educational options and the subtle, yet crucial, influence of friends and peers on these processes. It argues that focusing on both the impact of friends on educational decisions and the reciprocal influences that such decisions may exert on young people's friendships helps us to understand the significance and impact of educational choice in the wider lives of young people.

This volume focuses on how family-school partnerships are conceptualized, defined, and operationalized as well as the research that is needed to advance these foundational issues. Each chapter integrates prevailing approaches into a research-based framework for supporting learning from pre-K through high school. The book incorporates structural and relational methods into the larger context of educational processes to promote research about collaboration and to improve the academic and behavioral development of students. Diverse theories and models of family-school alliances demonstrate approaches and interventions that are goal-directed and strengths-based, respectful and responsive. In addition, the book analyzes cognitive, behavioral, and interpersonal aspects of partnership and discusses different methods of assessing parental involvement and student outcomes. Included in the coverage are innovative, agenda-setting discussions on: Definitions and conceptual frameworks of family-school partnerships. Need-satisfying partnerships. Diverse parent perspectives and participation. Measurement of family-school partnership constructs over time. Foundational Aspects of Family-School Partnership Research is an essential resource for researchers, professionals, and graduate students in child and school psychology, educational policy and politics, family studies, developmental psychology, sociology of education, sociology, and anthropology.

This book traces the growing influence of 'neuroparenting' in British policy and politics. Neuroparenting advocates claim that all parents require training, especially in how their baby's brain develops. Taking issue with the claims that 'the first years last forever' and that infancy is a 'critical period' during which parents must strive ever harder to 'stimulate' their baby's brain just to achieve normal development, the author offers a trenchant and incisive case against the experts who claim to know best and in favour of the privacy, intimacy and autonomy which makes family life worth living. The book will be of interest to students and scholars of Sociology, Family and Intimate Life, Cultural Studies, Neuroscience, Social Policy and Child Development, as well as individuals with an interest in family policy-making.

This book explores how young children and new families are located in the consumer world of affluent societies. The author assesses the way in which the value of infants and monetary value in markets are realized together, and examines how the meanings of childhood are enacted in the practices, narratives and materialities of contemporary markets. These meanings formulate what is important in the care of young children, creating moralities that impact not only on new parents, but also circumscribe the possibilities for monetary value creation. Three main understandings of early childhood - those of love, protection and purification - and their interrelationships are covered, and illustrated with examples including food, feeding tools, nappies, travel systems and toys. The book concludes by re-examining the relationship between adulthood and the cultural value of young children, and by discussing the implications of the ways markets address young children, also examines the realities of older children in consumer culture. Childhood and Markets will be of interest to students and scholars of sociology, childhood studies, anthropology, cultural studies, media studies, business studies and marketing.

At a time of global and domestic economic crisis, the financial aspects of domestic and familial relationships are more important and more strained than ever before. The focus of this book is on the distribution of wealth and poverty in traditional and non-traditional familial relationships. The volume takes an interdisciplinary approach to explore the way in which money matters are structured and governed within close personal relationships and the extent to which they have an impact on the nature and economic dynamics of relationships. As such, the key areas of investigation are the extent to which participation in the labour market, unpaid caregiving, inheritance, pensions and welfare reform have an impact on familial relationships. The authors also explore governmental and legal responses by investigating the privileging of certain types of domestic relationships, through fiscal and non-fiscal measures, and the differential provision on relationship breakdown. The impact of budget and welfare cuts is also examined for their effect on equality in domestic relationships.