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.

It is a commonly-voiced opinion that opportunities for mobility undermine family in modern industrialized societies. Family and Intimate Mobilities challenges this assumption. Drawing on theoretical developments in mobilities, family practices and personal life and empirical studies of both individuals and families on the move, the book develops a more integrated approach to family mobility. This account considers how individual mobility over the life course is bound up with the formation and dissolving of intimate mobilities as well as how collective forms of mobility, from moving house, going on holiday and the school run, also sustain family life. The book considers how mobility is not just about bringing people together but how it also allows for time apart. Yet not all mobility is realized or chosen, and intimate mobilities can either be forced or entered into out of sense of obligation. In rejecting the assumption that mobility necessarily undermines family life, the book also resists any attempt to provide a grand narrative of social change of family mobility, but foregrounds the diversity of family practices and mobility.

Conjugal Rites explores the legal shape of marriage as it has been determined by countless decisions concerning entry and exit into the ancient rite. Heather Brook examines the countless rules and protocols governing marriage that make it valid in the eyes of the law. She argues that the various sexual performatives associated with marriage can establish, reinforce, or rupture conjugal unity while exploring the historical and politcal regulations and prohibitions marriage has faced. Brook unites past and present, public and private, to investigate the changing meanings and effects of conjugality, and challenge the way we think about sex, gender and relationships.

Using an entirely new conceptual vocabulary through which to understand men's experiences and expectations at the dawn of the twenty-first century, this path-breaking volume focuses on fatherhood around the globe, including transformations in fathering, fatherhood, and family life. It includes new work by anthropologists, sociologists, and cultural geographers, working in settings from Peru to India to Vietnam. Each chapter suggests that men are responding to globalization as fathers in creative and unprecedented ways, not only in the West, but also in numerous global locations.

In November 1998, the Hawaii and Alaska electorates voted to amend their state constitutions so that same-sex marriages would not have to be recognized. Rather than end the controversy surrounding same-sex marriages, the passage of these amendments will only spur more litigation, because the referenda themselves implicate constitutional guarantees and because amending a state constitution cannot lessen federal constitutional protections. Since same-sex marriages promote many of the same individual and state interests that opposite-sex marriages do, states will be unable to justify their same-sex marriage bans if those rationales are closely examined. When challenged, the recent constitutional amendments in Hawaii and Alaska may well be held unconstitutional by the state supreme courts on federal constitutional grounds, although ultimately the United States Supreme Court will likely be asked to resolve the relevant issues.

Suppose that state same-sex marriage bans are held not to violate federal constitutional guarantees, but that one state nonetheless recognizes such unions. The other states will be permitted to refuse to recognize marriages celebrated in that state only if certain conditions have been met. Contrary view notwithstanding, the law of nature exception will not apply in this case. Further, even the Defense of Marriage Act will likely not afford states the right to refuse to recognize any and all same-sex marriages validly celebrated in sister states.

First published in 1984, this book focuses on the support and reassurance needed by parents of children with handicaps. It provides a practical guide in relation to daily care and is equally as relevant to professionals, therapists, teachers, doctors and psychologists who must advise parents. Written by an Occupational Therapist, the book highlights the need to make such children as independent as possible and gives advice on care of a special baby, modifications to the home environment, the needs of a child with a physical handicap, problems of educational handicap, and the place of a child in the family and community.

Why do parents who have high levels of education tend to have children who perform better at school, stay at school longer, and end up with more desirable jobs? Researchers have evidence of how distinct factors affect educational and occupational success, but significantly less understanding of the actual mechanisms involved. This work uses new Australian data to investigate those mechanisms, examining how cultural participation and parental encouragement affect adolescent and adult stratification outcomes in advanced modern society. Crook develops theoretical accounts of the possible mechanisms linking family background with socioeconomic success and tests competing hypotheses using a synthetic approach drawing on the strengths of the two distinct traditions of social stratification research.

Work-life integration is an increasingly hot topic in the media, social research, governments and in people's everyday lives. This volume offers a new type of lens for understanding work-family reconciliation by studying how work-family dynamics are shaped, squeezed and developed between consistent or competing logics in different societies in Europe and the US. The three institutions of "state", "family" and "working life", and their under-explored primary logics of "regulation", "morality" and "economic competitiveness" are examined theoretically as well as empirically throughout the chapters, thus contributing to an understanding of the contemporary challenges within the field of work-family research that combines structure and culture. Particular attention is given to the ways in which the institutions are confronted with various moral norms of good parenthood or motherhood and ideals for family life. Likewise, the logic of policy regulation and gendered family moralities are challenged by the economic logic of working life, based on competition in favour of the most productive workers and organizations. Demonstrating different aspects of what is behind and between the logics of state regulation, morals and market, this innovative volume will appeal to students, teachers and researchers interested in areas such as family studies, welfare state studies, social policy studies, work life studies as well as and gender studies.

With the prominence of one-name couples (Brangelina, Kimye) and famous families (the Smiths, the Beckhams), it is becoming increasingly clear that celebrity is no longer an individual pursuit-if it ever was. Accordingly, First Comes Love explores celebrity kinship and the phenomenon of the power couple: those relationships where two stars come together and where their individual identities as celebrities become inseparable from their status as a famous twosome. Taken together, the chapters in this volume interrogate the ways these alliances are bound up in wider cultural debates about marriage, love, intimacy, family, parenthood, sexuality, and gender, in their particular historical contexts, from the 1920s to the present day. Interdisciplinary in scope, First Comes Love seeks to establish how celebrity relationships play particular roles in dramatizing, disrupting, and reconciling often-contradictory ideas about coupledom and kinship formations.

The intersection of race, ethnicity and genomics has recently been a focus of debate and concern. The key areas of debate are pharmacogenomics and, to a lesser extent, racial profiling in the criminal justice system. The former poses the question as to whether certain "races" are genetically predisposed towards given diseases and whether they metabolize drugs differently; with the latter debating whether DNA analyses accurately identify the "race" of an individual. This book takes a different approach, while acknowledging the importance of these debates and their role in shaping what the issues are perceived to be in thinking about the intersection of race, ethnicity and genomics. We are interested in exploring the interconnections between race, ethnicity and nation and kinship, always bearing in mind that kinship, as a domain of human experience and a field of social study, has been reshaped by the genomic and biotechnological revolution. Peter Wade is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester. His publications include Blackness and Race Mixture (1993), Race and Ethnicity in Latin America (1997), Music, Race and Nation: Musica Tropical in Colombia (2000), Race, Nature and Culture: An Anthropological Perspective (2002). His current research focuses on issues of racial identity, embodiment and new genetic and information technologies.

In recent years the factors influencing young people's transition to adulthood have become much more problematic. This edited collection of papers from Pennsylvania State University's fifth annual Family Symposium explores the main issues involved in this transition, such as the widening gap between rich and poor, downsizing, global competition, and technological change. These factors have made jobs scarce in many areas, especially inner cities, and have profoundly affected family formation, making cohabitation, delays in marriage and parenthood, and prolonged residence with parents, the life choices of many young adults. These and other issues are explored by scholars from a wide variety of disciplines, who focus on four main questions: alterations in the structure of opportunity, prior experiences in the family, prior experiences in the workplace, and career development and marriage formation.

Marriage is a major step in a relationship, and each member of that newly joined pair brings with them their own existing family and the corresponding complexity and richness of in-law relationships. These are multi-generational, multi-layered, and, like a kaleidoscope, a shifting amalgam of emotional colors. Exceptionally important, in-law relationships can be joyous and comforting. They can also be complicated, contentious, and disappointing. These ties serve as a model for how to stay connected across generations for the well-being of grandparents, parents, and grandchildren, and as a bellwether for what to avoid. Drawing on interviews and survey data with more than 1,500 mothers-in-law, fathers-in-law, daughters-in-law, and sons-in-law, the book describes how these complicated and highly significant relationships develop over time. Geoffrey L. Greif and Michael E. Woolley focus on the relationships between mothers-in-law and daughters-in-law as well as fathers-in-law with sons-in-law. They describe the struggles as well as the triumphs that people encounter with these relationships from the perspectives of both generations and suggest ways to improve the relationships. To improve in-law relationships, Greif and Woolley present action-oriented family therapy theories based on the insight, communication, boundary building, and narratives that family members wish to create. They also explore how these relationships change with the normal transitions of marrying into the family, having children/grandchildren, and aging. In-law Relationships describes highly successful and nurturing connections as well as those that are troubled and distant. The resulting book offers a variety of clinical lenses to help readers of all backgrounds focus on and, if needed, repair in-law relationships.

This vivid recreation of family life as experienced in Nazi Germany during and after the Second World War tells the stories of mothers and fathers, sons and daughters, parents and children, in their own words. From desperate last letters sent to their loved ones by doomed soldiers at Stalingrad, to diaries kept by women trying to keep their families alive as the cities they lived in were devastated by constant bombing raids, this book presents a new and often unfamiliar account of family life under the most extreme conditions. Far from disintegrating under the strain, as many historians have argued, this book shows that the German family maintained and even strengthened the emotional bonds that tied its members together. Entering the war shaped, moulded and directed by the massive pressures brought to bear on it by Nazism's attempt to recast German society in its own image, the German family resisted these pressures and emerged at the end of the war in a new and stronger form, surviving the manifold problems of reunion and readjustment to the postwar, post-Nazi world with a surprising degree of resilience.

This study is based upon original research carried out with lesbian, gay and queer parents and explores how genealogy, kinship, family, everyday life, gender, race, state welfare and intimacy are theorized and lived out, drawing upon interactionist, feminist, discursive and queer sociologies.

Recent societal changes have challenged long-established concepts in psychoanalysis, including the Oedipus complex, parental functions, and male and female psychosexuality. 'Postmodern families', based on sexual and emotional exchanges independent of gender, now include homoerotic couples who adopt children, or who create them through assisted fertilisation, as well as single parent families and blended families. A number of highly-renowned Latin American psychoanalysts have drawn attention to the urgency of revising theoretical and clinical concepts in the light of these new scenarios. In this book, they open up ideas which cover familiar territory of current concerns in psychoanalytic work, as well as other little-explored areas, with the emphasis on evolving sexualities and new experiences of parenthood. The first section revisits psychoanalytic theories, particularly parental functions in the area of sexuality and gender. The following section discusses new family configurations, and vicissitudes of the desire to have a child in men and women, with the authors presenting some psychic consequences for parents in therapy who have turned to assisted fertilisation.

"This book traces the movement from mutualism to individualism in the context of American family life. Throughout American history, families survived or even flourished during colonization, the Revolution, slavery, the industrial revolution, immigration, and economic upheaval because reliance on others was patently necessary. But in the past century, unprecedented prosperity both freed Americans from mutual dependence and created a culture devoted to the pursuit of pleasure and individual fulfilment. This shift from obligation to freedom has turned the maintenance of durable, rewarding families into a countercultural act, one that requires a conscious decision to qualify the American commitment to freedom"--

This interdisciplinary volume offers theoretical, empirical, and practical insights into the strengths of families beset by chronic health issues. Featuring topics that run the lifespan from infancy to late adulthood, its coverage reflects both the diversity of family challenges in long-term illness and the wealth of effective approaches to intervention. The component skills of resilience in life-changing circumstances, from coping and meaning making to balancing care and self-care, are on rich display in a framework for their enhancement in therapy. The book's expert contributors include tools to aid readers in the learning and teaching of concepts as they model respectful, meaningful research methods and ethical, non-judgmental practice. Among the topics covered: Helping families survive and thrive through the premature birth of an infant. Enhancing coping and resiliency among families of individuals with sickle cell disease. A family science approach to pediatric obesity treatment. Risk and resilience of children and families involved with the foster care system. Strengthening families facing breast cancer: emerging trends and clinical recommendations. The unfolding of unique problems in later life families. With its mix of practical and empirical expertise, Family Resilience and Chronic Illness: Interdisciplinary and Translational Perspectives has much to offer both researchers in the family resilience field and mental health practitioners working with clients with chronic illness.

Describes trends that signal societal changes in household composition, family structure, and women's working patterns. Interprets their implications for future policy planning and institutional accommodation.

The debate on the origins of modern gender norms continues unabated across the academic disciplines. This book adds an important and hitherto neglected dimension. Focusing on rural life and its values, the author argues that the modern ideal of separate spheres originated in the era of the Enlightenment. Prior to the eighteenth century, cultural norms prescribed active, interdependent economic roles for both women and men. Enlightenment economists transformed these gender paradigms as they postulated a market exchange system directed exclusively by men. By the early nineteenth century, the emerging bourgeois value system affirmed the new civil society and the market place as exclusively male realms. These standards defined women's options largely as marriage and motherhood.

Managing social relationships for childless couples in pro-natalist societies can be a difficult art to master, and may even become an issue of belonging for both men and women. With ethnographic research gathered from two IVF clinics and in two villages in northwestern Turkey, this book explores infertility and assisted reproductive technologies within a secular Muslim population. Goeknar investigates the experience of infertility through various perspectives, such as the importance of having a child for women, the mediating role of religion, the power dynamics in same-gender relationships, and the impact of manhood ideologies on the decision for - or against - having IVF.

Ethel Robinson has written an amazing book. As she wisely argues, despite a rapidly growing middle and upper class, popular media and public debates continue to view African-American families from a deficit perspective. Portrayals of African-American families in newspapers, television, and contemporary scholarship tend to focus on single-parent households, low parental expectations, and lack of family involvement in schooling. The families you will meet in this book contradict these stereotypes. In carefully crafted vignettes, Dr. Robinson and paints an alternative portrait of life in African-American households. In this marvelous book, you will see eight intact families intimately involved in the academic and social lives of their children. Some volunteer in their children's classrooms; others serve as devoted tutors and mentors; still others are active advocates, arguing passionately for school services; all hold fast to the hope that their children will achieve their piece of the American dream. This book is a powerful antidote to the negative portrayals of African-American families that abound in mainstream media.It is a ""must-read"" for researchers, educators, and all who wish to look beyond and beneath the stereotypes of African-American family life.

Fertility rates vary considerably across and within societies, and over time. Over the last three decades, social demographers have made remarkable progress in documenting these axes of variation, but theoretical models to explain family change and variation have lagged behind. At the same time, our sister disciplines-from cultural anthropology to social psychology to cognitive science and beyond-have made dramatic strides in understanding how social action works, and how bodies, brains, cultural contexts, and structural conditions are coordinated in that process. "Understanding Family Change and Variation: Toward a Theory of Conjunctural Action" argues that social demography must be reintegrated into the core of theory and research about the processes and mechanisms of social action, and proposes a framework through which that reintegration can occur. This framework posits that material and schematic structures profoundly shape the occurrence, frequency, and context of the vital events that constitute the object of social demography. Fertility and family behaviors are best understood as a function not just of individual traits, but of the structured contexts in which behavior occurs. This approach upends many assumptions in social demography, encouraging demographers to embrace the endogeneity of social life and to move beyond fruitless debates of structure versus culture, of agency versus structure, or of biology versus society.

In this collection, over 40 researchers across the social sciences offer a series of engaging accounts reflecting on dilemmas and issues that they experienced while researching and communicating research on personal life. Their insights are food for thought for students, researchers, professionals and anyone using, planning or conducting research on families and relationships, encouraging critical reflection on the readers' own processes. Researchers' accounts are organised under and commented on by insightful overviews. David Morgan leads with consideration of framing research. Kay Tisdall prefaces the next set by reflections on ethical considerations in research engagements. Angus Bancroft and Stuart Aitken each comment on researchers' accounts from 'in the field' focusing on the research relationship and the complexities of time and place. The final accounts are prefaced by Lynn Jamieson's discussion of dealing with dilemmas in interpreting and representing families and relationships and by Sarah Morton's and Sandra Nutley's reflections on getting research into policy and practice.