As family structures continue to evolve, aging relatives have caused increasing concern for family members as they attempt to manage complex issues such as health, caregiving, emotional and instrumental support, and intergenerational relationships. This multidisciplinary volume focuses on how aging interacts with family structures and relationship dynamics. Including research from around the globe, the authors address a wide array of topics, including family support networks, elderly care, grandparenthood, marital dynamics and satisfaction, elderly divorce, cohabitation, gender, and intergenerational relationships, and more. Paying homage to the fact that the manners by which aging affects families can vary considerably from one culture to another, this collection makes a crucial contribution by collating research on aging and the family from an international perspective. Providing this wide scope of quality research, the volume equips readers to better assess how aging and its related issues are affecting families from multiple backgrounds.

This book critically interrogates how young people are introduced to landscapes through environmental education, outdoor recreation, and youth-led learning, drawing on diverse examples of green, blue, outdoor, or natural landscapes. Understanding the relationships between young people and unfamiliar landscapes is vital for young people's current and future education and wellbeing, but how landscapes and young people are socially constructed as unfamiliar is controversial and contested. Young people are constructed as unfamiliar within certain landscapes along lines of race, gender or class: this book examines the cultures of outdoor learning that perpetuate exclusions and inclusions, and how unfamiliarity is encountered, experienced, constructed, and reproduced. This interdisciplinary text, drawing on Human Geography, Education, Leisure and Heritage Studies, and Anthropology, challenges commonly-held assumptions about how and why young people are educated in unfamiliar landscapes. Practice is at the heart of this book, which features three 'conversations with practitioners' who draw on their personal and professional experiences. The chapters are organised into five themes: (1) The unfamiliar outdoors; (2) The unfamiliar past; (3) Embodying difference in unfamiliar landscapes; (4) Being well, and being unfamiliar; and (5) Digital and sonic encounters with unfamiliarity. Educational practitioners, researchers and students will find this book essential for taking forward more inclusive outdoor and youth-led education.

In her research with transnational Mexicans, Deborah A. Boehm has often asked individuals: if there were no barriers to your movement between Mexico and the United States, where would you choose to live? Almost always, they desire the freedom to "come and go." Yet the barriers preventing such movement are many. Because of the United States' rigid immigration policies, Mexican immigrants often find themselves living long distances from family members and unable to easily cross the U.S.-Mexico border. Transnational Mexicans experience what Boehm calls "intimate migrations," flows that both shape and are structured by gendered and familial actions and interactions, but are always defined by the presence of the U.S. state. Intimate Migrations is based on over a decade of ethnographic research, focusing on Mexican immigrants with ties to a small, rural community in the Mexican state of San Luis Potosi and several states in the U.S. West. By showing how intimate relations direct migration, and by looking at kin and gender relationships through the lens of illegality, Boehm sheds new light on the study of gender and kinship, as well as understandings of the state and transnational migration.

A detailed account of how gender is learned and unlearned in the home From the selection of toys, clothes, and activities to styles of play and emotional expression, the family is ground zero for where children learn about gender. Despite recent awareness that girls are not too fragile to play sports and that boys can benefit from learning to cook, we still find ourselves surrounded by limited gender expectations and persistent gender inequalities. Through the lively and engaging stories of parents from a wide range of backgrounds, The Gender Trap provides a detailed account of how today's parents understand, enforce, and resist the gendering of their children. Emily Kane shows how most parents make efforts to loosen gendered constraints for their children, while also engaging in a variety of behaviors that reproduce traditionally gendered childhoods, ultimately arguing that conventional gender expectations are deeply entrenched and that there is great tension in attempting to undo them while letting 'boys be boys' and 'girls be girls.'

How have employment relations evolved over the last decade? And how did workplaces and employees fare in the face of the longest recession in living memory? Employment Relations in the Shadow of Recession examines the state of British employment relations in 2011, how this has changed since 2004, and the role the recession played in shaping employees' experiences of work. It draws on findings from the 2011 Workplace Employment Relations Study, comparing these with the results of the previous study conducted in 2004. These surveys - each collecting responses from around 2,500 workplace managers, 1,000 employee representatives and over 20,000 employees - provide the most comprehensive portrait available of workplace employment relations in Britain. The book provides an in-depth analysis of the changes made to employment practices through the recession and of the impact that the economic downturn had on the shape and character of the employment relationship.

Flexible Families examines the struggles among Nicaraguan migrants in Costa Rica (and their families back in Nicaragua) to maintain a sense of family across borders. The book is based on more than twenty-four months of ethnographic fieldwork in Costa Rica and Nicaragua (2009-2012) and more than ten years of engagement with Nicaraguan migrant communities. Author Caitlin Fouratt finds that migration and family intersect as sites for triaging inequality, economic crisis, and a lack of state-provided social services since the 1990s. Flexible Families situates transnational families in an analysis of the history of unstable family life in Nicaragua due to decades of war and economic crisis, rather than in the migration process itself, which is often blamed for family breakdown in public discourse. Fouratt argues that the kinds of family configurations often seen as problematic consequences of migration-specifically single mothers, absent fathers, and grandmother caregivers-represent flexible family configurations that have enabled Nicaraguan families to survive the chronic crises of the past decades. By examining the work that goes into forging and sustaining transnational kinship, the book argues for a rethinking of national belonging and discourses of solidarity. In parallel, the book critically examines conditions in Costa Rica, especially the ways in which the instabilities and inequalities that have haunted the rest of the region have begun to take shape there, resulting in perceptions of increased crime rates and a declining quality of life. By linking this crisis of Costa Rican exceptionalism to recent immigration reform, the book also builds on scholarship about the production and experiences of immigrant exclusion. Flexible Families offers insight into the impacts of increasingly restrictive immigration policies in the everyday lives of transnational families within the developing world.

Brent Waters examines the historical roots and contemporary implications of the virtual disappearance of the family in late liberal and Christian social and political thought. Waters argues that the principal cause of this disappearance is late liberalism's fixation on individual autonomy, which renders familial bonds unintelligible. He traces the history of this emphasis, from its origin in Hobbes and Locke, through Kant, to such contemporary theorists as Rawls and Okin. In response, Waters offers an alternative normative account of the family's role in social and political ordering, drawing upon the work of Althusius, Grotius, Dooyeweerd, and O'Donovan.

Bringing Children Back into the Family reflects on the multi-dimensional nature of children's relationships within the home. It explores the extent to which these experiences shape children's meaning-making and how this influences how they position themselves in relation to adults. A global team of contributors paint a picture of the complexity of the family, and the extent to which understandings of 'home' are deepened by reflecting on children's experiences as social agents. The chapters and supporting case studies offer some fascinating reflections that explore home in relation to a range of themes including participation, friendship, memory, moral reflectivity, children's rights and migration. With a focus on relationality and connectedness this book reflects on the duality of structure and agency, as it examines this web of interactions and their impact on children's experiences of the home.

In January 2002, investigative reporting at the Boston Globe set off a wave of revelations regarding child sexual abuse by Catholic clergy and the transferring of abusive priests from parish to parish. Public allegations against clergy reached unprecedented levels; one Bishop would later refer to the period as ''our 9/11.'' Reeling from a growing awareness of abuse within their Church, a small group of Catholics gathered after Mass in the basement of a parish in Wellesley, Massachusetts to mourn and react. They began to mobilize around supporting victims of abuse, supporting non-abusive priests, and advocating for structural change in the Catholic Church so that abuse would no longer occur. Voice of the Faithful (VOTF) built a movement by harnessing the faith and fury of a nation of Catholics shocked by reports of abuse and institutional complicity. Some 30,000 around the United States formally joined the VOTF movement to reform the Catholic Church. Faithful Revolution offers an in-depth look at the development of Voice of the Faithful and their struggle to challenge Church leaders, advocate for internal change, and be accepted as legitimately Catholic while doing so. In a study based on three years of field observation and interviews with VOTF founders, leaders, and participants in settings throughout the U.S., Bruce shows the contested nature of a religious movement operating within a bounded institutional space. Guided by the stories of individual participants, this book brings to light the intense identity negotiations that accompany a challenge to one's own religion. Faithful Revolution offers a meaningful and accessible way to learn about Catholic identity, intra-institutional social movements, and the complexity of institutional structures.

Judith Stacey, 2012 winner of the Simon and Gagnon Lifetime Achievement Award presented by the American Sociological Association. A leading expert on the family explores varieties of love and counters the one-size-fits-all vision of family values A leading expert on the family, Judith Stacey is known for her provocative research on mainstream issues. Finding herself impatient with increasingly calcified positions taken in the interminable wars over same-sex marriage, divorce, fatherlessness, marital fidelity, and the like, she struck out to profile unfamiliar cultures of contemporary love, marriage, and family values from around the world. Built on bracing original research that spans gay men's intimacies and parenting in America to plural and non-marital forms of family in South Africa and China, Unhitched decouples the taken for granted relationships between love, marriage, and parenthood. Countering the one-size-fits-all vision of family values, Stacey offers readers a lively, in-person introduction to these less familiar varieties of intimacy and family and to the social, political, and economic conditions that buttress and batter them. Through compelling stories of real families navigating inescapable personal and political trade-offs between desire and domesticity, the book undermines popular convictions about family, gender, and sexuality held on the left, right, and center. Taking on prejudices of both conservatives and feminists, Unhitched poses a powerful empirical challenge to the belief that the nuclear family-whether straight or gay-is the single, best way to meet our needs for intimacy and care. Stacey calls on citizens and policy-makers to make their peace with the fact that family diversity is here to stay.

With about 70,000 domestic and international adoptions each year in the United States and Canada, adoption remains a major means of building families in both countries. Its continued success can be inferred not only from the yearly statistics, but from a report issued in 2003 by the U.S. Census Bureau. To the surprise of many, the report announced the existence of 1.6 million adopted children in the U.S. under the age of eighteen. Written by a former social worker who has placed hundreds of children in foster and adoptive homes and a clinical psychologist who has counseled adopted children and parents, this book offers a comprehensive look at the adoption process by merging the best of social work with the best of psychology. Adoption can be a frustrating and intimidating undertaking for the unprepared. This guide provides prospective adoptive parents with the insider information that they need to navigate the process-and it provides students with the sort of expert opinion that they need to grasp the academic theory they receive in the classroom. Highlights include: An insider's look at the home study process Advice on single-parent adoptions Advice on gay parent adoptions Advice on parenting adopted children A look at adoption procedures in both the United States and Canada Information about international adoptions A directory of adoption agencies in the United States and Canada

This volume provides insight into the family life of Native Americans of the northeast quadrant of the North American continent and those living in the adjacent coastal and piedmont regions. These Native Americans were among the most familiar to Euro-colonials for more than two centuries. From the tribes of the northeast woodlands came "great hunters, fishermen, farmers and fighters, as well as the most powerful and sophisticated Indian nation north of Mexico [the Iroquois Confederacy].

Based on almost a decade of research in the Kathmandu Valley, Planning Families in Nepal offers a compelling account of Hindu Nepali women as they face conflicting global and local ideals regarding family planning. Promoting a two-child norm, global family planning programs have disseminated the slogan, ""A small family is a happy family,"" throughout the global South. Jan Brunson examines how two generations of Hindu Nepali women negotiate this global message of a two-child family and a more local need to produce a son. Brunson explains that while women did not prefer sons to daughters, they recognized that in the dominant patrilocal family system, their daughters would eventually marry and be lost to other households. As a result, despite recent increases in educational and career opportunities for daughters, mothers still hoped for a son who would bring a daughter-in-law into the family and care for his aging parents. Mothers worried about whether their modern, rebellious sons would fulfill their filial duties, but ultimately those sons demonstrated an enduring commitment to living with their aging parents. In the context of rapid social change related to national politics as well as globalization - a constant influx of new music, clothes, gadgets, and even governments - the sons viewed the multigenerational family as a refuge. Throughout Planning Families in Nepal, Brunson raises important questions about the notion of ""planning"" when applied to family formation, arguing that reproduction is better understood as a set of local and global ideals that involve actors with desires and actions with constraints, wrought with delays, stalling, and improvisation.

Drawing on detailed qualitative research, this timely study explores the experiences of fathers who take on equal or primary care responsibilities for young children. The authors examine what prompts these arrangements, how fathers adjust to their caregiving roles over time, and what challenges they face along the way. The book asks what would encourage more fathers to become primary or equal caregivers, and how we can make things easier for those who do. Offering new academic insight and practical recommendations, this will be key reading for those interested in parenting, families and gender, including researchers, policymakers, practitioners and students.

This thoroughly revised second edition offers a child-centered, international perspective as it urges America to de-stigmatize alternate family forms. In this book's first edition, Philip L. Kilbride showed polygamy as the preferred marriage pattern in most parts of the nonwestern world and explained how plural marriage is surfacing in western countries to address economic and spiritual crises. In Plural Marriage for Our Times: A Reinvented Option? Second Edition, Kilbride and his coauthor, Douglas R. Page, update and enhance this thesis in light of contemporary circumstances, new studies, and current legal debates. This new edition examines plural marriage's benefits for children. It extends the discussion of polygamy and religion, especially the Muslim perspective on marriage and family; considers the illegal polygamy of immigrants; and looks at multiple marriage in African American communities, where "crisis polygamy" is a growing phenomenon. The authors suggest Americans consider plural marriage as a viable practice that can help reduce the divorce rate, better protect women and children, and serve as an alternative to the "fractured family" so prevalent in America today. Includes an extensive bibliography

For most of its history, contemporary Paganism has been a religion of converts. Yet as it enters its fifth decade, it is incorporating growing numbers of second-generation Pagans for whom Paganism is a family tradition, not a religious worldview arrived at via a spiritual quest. In Pagan Family Values, S. Zohreh Kermani explores the ways in which North American Pagan families pass on their beliefs to their children, and how the effort to socialize children influences this new religious movement. The first ethnographic study of the everyday lives of contemporary Pagan families, this volume brings their experiences into conversation with contemporary issues in American religion. Through formal interviews with Pagan families, participant observation at various pagan events, and data collected via online surveys, Kermani traces the ways in which Pagan parents transmit their religious values to their children. Rather than seeking to pass along specific religious beliefs, Pagan parents tend to seek to instill values, such as religious tolerance and spiritual independence, that will remain with their children throughout their lives, regardless of these children's ultimate religious identifications. Pagan parents tend to construct an idealized, magical childhood for their children that mirrors their ideal childhoods. The socialization of children thus becomes a means by which adults construct and make meaningful their own identities as Pagans. Kermani's meticulous fieldwork and clear, engaging writing provide an illuminating look at parenting and religious expression in Pagan households and at how new religions pass on their beliefs to a new generation.