This book examines the many roles of families in their members' food access, preferences, and consumption. It provides an overview of factors - from micro- to macro-levels - that have been linked to food insecurity and discusses policy approaches to reducing food insecurity and hunger. In addition, it addresses the links between food insecurity and overweight and obesity. The book describes changes in the U.S. food environment that may explain increases in obesity during recent decades. It explores relationships between parenting practices and the development of eating behaviors in children, highlighting the importance of family mealtimes in healthful eating. The volume provides an overview of efforts to prevent or reduce obesity in children, with attention to minority populations and discusses research findings on targets for obesity prevention, including a focus on fathers as change agents who play a crucial, yet understudied, role in food parenting. The book acknowledges that with the current obesigenic environment in the United States and elsewhere around the world, additional and innovative efforts are needed to foster healthful eating behavior and orientations toward food in childhood and in families. This book is a must-have resource for researchers, professors, clinicians, professionals, and graduate students in developmental psychology, family studies, public health as well as numerous interrelated disciplines, including sociology, demography, social work, prevention science, educational policy, political science, and economics.

This volume provides a novel platform to re-evaluate the notion of open-ended intimacies through the lens of affect theories. Contributors address the embodied, affective and psychic, sensorial and embodied aspects of their ongoing intimate entanglements across various timely phenomena. This fascinating collection asks how the study of affect enables us to rethink intimacies, what affect theories can do to the prevailing notion of intimacy and how they renew and enrich theories of intimacy in a manner which also considers its normative and violent forms. This collection brings together a selection of original chapters which invite readers to rethink such concepts as care, closeness and connectivity through the notion of affective intimacies. Based on rigorous research, it offers novel insights on a variety of themes from austerity culture to online discussions on regretting motherhood, from anti-ableist notions of health to teletherapies in the era of COVID-19, and from queer intimacies to critiques of empathy. Lively and thought-provoking, this collection contributes to timely topics across the social sciences, representing multiple disciplines from gender studies, sociology and cultural studies to anthropology and queer studies. By so doing, it advances the value of interdisciplinary perspectives and creative methodologies for understanding affective intimacies. -- .

College students are particularly vulnerable to making poor financial decisions. One method of addressing personal finances and financial stress among students of higher education is through university based financial education programs. Student Financial Literacy: Program Development presents effective strategies to assist in the implementation or the enhancement of a program as a tool to improve students' educational experience and financial well-being. It presents the key components of financial education programs designed to address the growing concerns associated with high levels of debt and low levels of financial literacy among college students.

""Student Financial Literacy: Campus-Based Program Development" is packed with financial education and counseling information and guidance. It was very difficult to write this review as I wanted to share ALL the excellent direction this book provides... The editors and contributing authors have developed an excellent resource for not only those interested in developing or enhancing a campus-based financial education program but also for anyone involved in financial education, counseling, and planning."

-Rebecca J. Travnichek, Family Financial Education Specialist, University of Missouri Extension

Journal of Financial Counseling and Planning

We routinely judge how well children are doing in their lives by how they spend their time, yet we know remarkably little about it. This rigorous review of four decades of data provides the clearest insights yet into the way children use their time. With analysis of changes in the time spent on family, education, culture and technology, as well as children's own views on their habits, it provides a fascinating perspective on behaviour, wellbeing, social change and more. This is an indispensable companion to the work of policy makers, academics and researchers, and anyone interested in the daily lives of children.

You've heard it before: Your friend's husband is acting distant, and she blames herself. Rumor starts to spread that he's running around with his secretary, and still your friend doesn't see. Then he drops the Bomb, moves out--and is soon happily remarried to his mistress. How could your friend have been so blind? That could never happen to you.
Statistics show that 35% of husbands cheat on their wives. In The Script, Elizabeth Landers and Vicky Mainzer take readers through the standard lines that have been used by hundreds of unfaithful husbands.
Like a screenplay for a movie you never wanted to see, The Script indicates which signs to look for, red flags you might not have noticed before, and how to turn the tide of disaster before it's too late.

Mixed feelings about motherhood - uncertainty over having a child, fears of pregnancy and childbirth, or negative thoughts about one's own children - are not just hard to discuss, they are a powerful social taboo. In this beautifully written book, Barbara Almond brings this troubling issue to light. She uncovers the roots of ambivalence, tells how it manifests in lives of women and their children, and describes a spectrum of maternal behavior - from normal feelings to highly disturbed mothering. In a society where perfection in parenting is the unattainable ideal, this compassionate book also shows how women can affect positive change in their lives.

The present book aims to examine how sexual selection works in the human species. Almost all scholarly effort focuses on sexual selection in non-human species and extrapolates the findings to the human one. However, human mating has a unique pattern not found in any other species, namely parental influence over mate choice. Across preindustrial societies, the typical pattern of long-term mating is arranged marriage, where parents choose spouses for their children. By doing so, parents effectively become a sexual selection force. Traits that enhance an individual's chance to be selected as a son- or a daughter-in-law confer important reproductive advantages to those who are endowed with them, increasing in frequency in the population. The author has coined the term parental choice to describe the sexual selection force that arises from parental control over mating. He synthesizes extensive theoretical and empirical work in order to understand and model this force. The aim is to understand which factors give rise to parental choice and to combine these insights into constructing a more formal model. It also aims to further examine whether the predictions of the model fit the patterns of mating found across different types of human societies, and how the model can be used to understand the evolution of behavioral traits involved in mating. By synthesizing the various arguments put forward and published across the literature, the book offers a comprehensive argument and overview of an aspect of sexual selection unique to our species. Furthermore, the book revises and extends previously made arguments and models, while it provides useful insights on how the proposed revision of sexual selection theory can enable us to understand a wide range of human behavioral phenomena. It should be key reading for those interested in studying sexual selection in general and in the Homo sapiens species in particular.

This book adopts a critical youth studies approach and theorizes the digital as a key feature of the everyday to analyse how ideas about youth and cyber-safety, digital inclusion and citizenship are mobilized. Despite a growing interest in the benefits and opportunities for young people online, both 'young people' and 'the digital' continue to be constructed primarily as sites of social and cultural anxiety requiring containment and control. Juxtaposing public policy, popular educational and parental framings of young people's digital practices with the insights from fieldwork conducted with young Australians aged 12-25, the book highlights the generative possibilities of attending to intergenerational tensions. In doing so, the authors show how a shift beyond the paradigm of control opens up towards a deeper understanding of the capacities that are generated in and through digital life for young and old alike. Young People in Digital Society will be of interest to scholars and students in youth studies, cultural studies, sociology, education, and media and communications.

This book uses the youth life stage as a window through which to view all domains of life in present-day Saudi Arabia: family life, education, the impact of new media, the labour market, religion and politics. The authors draw extensively on their interviews with 25-35 year olds, selected so as to represent the life chances of males and females who grow up in different socio-economic strata, and typically face different futures. The book presents an account of the ways in which family life, education, religion, employment and the housing regimes interlock, and how and why this interlocking is subject to increasing stresses. The chapters, which are built on documentary research, official published statistics and the authors' original evidence, provide invaluable insights into Saudi youth, which has never before been examined in such depth. Youth in Saudi Arabia will be of interest to students and scholars across a range of disciplines including Sociology, Politics and Middle East Studies.

Diverse Pathways to Parenthood: From Narratives to Practice is a timely contribution to the study of reproduction and parenthood. Drawing on a wide breadth of projects, this book covers topics such as first time parents, donor conception, pregnancy loss, surrogacy, lesbian, gay and/or transgender parenting, fostering and adoption, grandparenting, and human/animal kinship. By presenting individual narratives focused on reproduction and parenthood, this book successfully translates empirical research into practical, applied outcomes that will be of use for all those working in the fields of reproduction and parenthood. Including recommendations for fertility specialists, educators, child protection agencies, reproductive counselors, and policy makers, Diverse Pathways to Parenthood: From Narratives to Practice is a vital new resource that will help guide practice into the future. As a contribution to the field of critical kinship studies, this book heralds new directions for the study of kinship, by revisiting as well as reimagining how we think about, research, and respond to a diversity of kinship forms.

The ageing of our population is a key societal issue across the globe. Although people are living longer, they need to be living longer in good health to continue to enjoy quality of life and independence and to prevent rises in health and social care costs. This timely and ground-breaking volume will provide an up-to-date overview of the factors that promote physical activity in later life. Despite advances in the fields of gerontology and geriatrics, sports and exercise science, sociology, health psychology, and public health, knowledge is largely contained within disciplines as reflected in the current provision of academic texts on this subject. To truly address the present and substantial societal challenges of population ageing, a multidisciplinary and collaborative approach is required. This handbook will inform researchers, students, and practitioners on the current evidence base for what physical activities need to be promoted among older people and how they can be implemented to maximise engagement. This handbook will be an invaluable resource for researchers, practitioners, policy makers, and students across the social sciences.

Honorable Mention, Sex & Gender Section Distinguished Book Award, given by the American Sociological Association The surprising reasons parents are opting out of the public school system and homeschooling their kids Homeschooling has skyrocketed in popularity in the United States: in 2019, a record-breaking 2.5 million children were being homeschooled. In The Homeschool Choice, Kate Henley Averett provides insight into this fascinating phenomenon, exploring the perspectives of parents who have chosen to homeschool their children. Drawing on in-depth interviews, Averett examines the reasons why these parents choose to homeschool, from those who disagree with sex education and LGBT content in schools, to others who want to protect their children's sexual and gender identities. With eye-opening detail, she shows us how homeschooling is a trend being chosen by an increasingly diverse subset of American families, at times in order to empower-or constrain-children's gender and sexuality. Ultimately, Averett explores how homeschooling, as a growing practice, has changed the roles that families, schools, and the state play in children's lives. As teachers, parents, and policymakers debate the future of public education, The Homeschool Choice sheds light on the ongoing struggle over school choice.

This edited volume concerns childhood throughout South America after the 1990s, a period and territory of special complexity marked by the beginning-or intensification of-political neoliberalisation throughout the region. The decade also saw the ratification of the International Convention on Rights of the Child and post-dictatorial processes of political and social democratisation. The editors of this book explore the tension this juxtaposition has generated between logics and processes of dissimilar orientations. Within this framework, chapters investigate the neoliberalisation and institutionalisation of children's rights and consider similarities and differences with respect to other regions. They also explore changes in schools and educational systems, as well as the phenomenon of the internal and external child and family migration.

This expansive reference examines the many types of Family Life Education (FLE) programs being offered around the world, reflecting a myriad of cultures and contexts. Coverage identifies core FLE content areas including parenting education, human sexuality, and interpersonal relationships, and details their programming in various countries over six continents, the Caribbean, and the Middle East. Contributors discuss complex challenges of program design, implementation, and evaluation, as well as connections between FLE and family prevention and intervention services. This knowledge is of great theoretical and practical utility across various fields, and is of particular interest to those developing programs for diverse populations. This unique volume: Presents in-depth information on Family Life Education programs from different countries around the world. Discusses how the socio-historic, political, and economic context of a country impacts its families and family services and programs. Covers current topics including poverty, domestic violence, and immigration. Encourages best practices and thorough understanding of the country/region. Offers recommendations for family service providers. Global Perspectives on Family Life Education is a trove of vital knowledge benefitting scholars and researchers as well as professors, postgraduates, graduate and undergraduate students, and practitioners in the family sciences, family life education, family therapy, social work, child and family studies, psychology, sociology, social work, cultural studies, and urban studies.

Lone parenthood is an increasing reality in the 21st century, reinforced by the diffusion of divorce and separation. This volume provides a comprehensive portrait of lone parenthood at the beginning of the XXI century from a life course perspective. The contributions included in this volume examine the dynamics of lone parenthood in the life course and explore the trajectories of lone parents in terms of income, poverty, labour, market behaviour, wellbeing, and health. Throughout, comparative analyses of data from countries as France, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Germany, Belgium, Sweden, Switzerland, Hungary, and Australia help portray how lone parenthood varies between regions, cultures, generations, and institutional settings. The findings show that one-parent households are inhabited by a rather heterogeneous world of mothers and fathers facing different challenges. Readers will not only discover the demographics and diversity of lone parents, but also the variety of social representations and discourses about the changing phenomenon of lone parenthood. The book provides a mixture of qualitative and quantitative studies on lone parenthood. Using large scale and longitudinal panel and register data, the reader will gain insight in complex processes across time. More qualitative case studies on the other hand discuss the definition of lone parenthood, the public debate around it, and the social and subjective representations of lone parents themselves. This book aims at sociologists, demographers, psychologists, political scientists, family therapists, and policy makers who want to gain new insights into one of the most striking changes in family forms over the last 50 years. This book is open access under a CC BY License.

This book examines the complex impact of prenatal stress and the mechanism of its transmission on children's development and well-being, including prenatal programming, epigenetics, infl ammatory processes, and the brain-gut microbiome. It analyzes current findings on prenatal stressors affecting pregnancy, including preconception stress, prenatal maternal depression, anxiety, and pregnancy-specific anxieties. Chapters explore how prenatal stress affects cognitive, affective, behavioral, and neurobiological development in children while pinpointing core processes of adaptation, resilience, and interventions that may reduce negative behaviors and promote optimal outcomes in children. Th is complex perspective on mechanisms by which early environmental influences interact with prenatal programming of susceptibility aims to inform clinical strategies and future research targeting prenatal stress and its cyclical impact on subsequent generations. Key areas of coverage include: The developmental effects of prenatal maternal stress on children. Epigenetic effects of prenatal stress. Intergenerational transmission of parental early life stress. The microbiome-gut-brain axis and the effects of prenatal stress on early neurodevelopment. The effect of prenatal stress on parenting. Gestational stress and resilience. Prenatal stress and children's sleeping behavior. Prenatal, perinatal, and population-based interventions to prevent psychopathology. Prenatal Stress and Child Development is an essential resource for researchers, professors and graduate students as well as clinicians, therapists, and related professionals in infancy and early childhood development, maternal and child health, developmental psychology, pediatrics, social work, child and adolescent psychiatry, developmental neuroscience, and related behavioral and social sciences and medical disciplines. Excerpt from the foreword: "I would make the plea that in addition to anyone with an interest in child development, this book should be essential reading for researchers pursuing "pre-clinical, basic science models of neurodevelopment and brain health".... This book provides what in my mind is the most advanced compilation of existing knowledge and state-of-the-art science in the field of prenatal psychiatry/psychology (and perhaps in the entire field of prenatal medicine). This volume can brilliantly serve to focus future directions in our understanding of the perinatal determinants of brain health."Michael J Meaney James McGill Professor of Medicine Translational Neuroscience Programme Adjunct Professor of Paediatrics

This book breaks new theoretical ground by constructing a framework of 'relational vulnerability' through which it analyses the disadvantaged position of those who undertake unpaid caregiving, or 'dependency-work', in the context of the private family. Expanding on existing socio-legal scholarship on vulnerability and resilience, it charts how the state seeks to conceal the embodied and temporal reality of vulnerability and dependency within the private family, while promoting an artificial concept of autonomous personhood that exposes dependency-workers work to a range of harms. The book argues that the legal framework governing the married and unmarried family reinforces principles of individualism and rationality, while labelling dependency-work as a private, gendered, and sentimental endeavor, lacking value beyond the family. It also considers how the state can respond to relational vulnerability and foster resilience. It seeks to provide a more comprehensive understanding of resilience, theorising its normative goals and applying these to different hypothetical state responses.

This collection defines the field of maternal studies in Australia for the first time. Leading motherhood researchers explore how mothering has evolved across Australian history as well as the joys and challenges of being a mother today. The contributors cover pregnancy, birth, relationships, childcare, domestic violence, time use, work, welfare, policy and psychology, from a diverse range of maternal perspectives. Utilising a matricentric feminist framework, Australian Mothering foregrounds the experiences, emotions and perspectives of mothers to better understand how Australian motherhood has developed historically and contemporaneously. Drawing upon their combined sociological and historical expertise, Bueskens and Pascoe Leahy have carefully curated a collection that presents compelling research on past and present perspectives on maternity in Australia, which will be relevant to researchers, advocates and policy makers interested in the changing role of mothers in Australian society.

This book explores an online support group for women who are infertile. Offering a close-up view of the women's identities and emotions as they navigate the "roller-coaster" world of infertility, a range of questions are addressed: How do the women seek support? How do they offer support to one another? How are intimacies produced in the online space? Through narrative analysis of online journals and posts, the authors examine the impact of infertility on women's perceptions of their bodies, their struggles with medical professionals, on their relationships with family and friends, and the challenges that a diagnosis of infertility presents to couples. Infertility and Intimacy in an Online Community will appeal to social scientists, students from a range of health science disciplines, counsellors and health professionals, and women and men who are dealing with infertility.

This book investigates the life trajectories of Generation X and Y Australians through the 1990s and 2000s. The book defies popular characterizations of members of the 'precarious generations' as greedy, narcissistic and self-obsessed, revealing instead that many of the members of these generations struggle to reach the standard of living enjoyed by their parents, value learning highly and are increasingly concerned about the environment and the legacy current generations are leaving for their children and remain optimistic in the face of considerable challenges. Drawing on data from the Life Patterns longitudinal study of Australian youth (an internationally recognized study), the book tells the story of members of these 'precarious generations'. It examines significant dimensions of young people's lives across time, comparing how domains such as health and well-being, education, work and relationships intersect to produce the complex outcomes that characterize the lives of members of each of these generations. It also explores the strategies these generations use to make their lives and the ways in which they remain resilient. While the book is based on Australian data, the analysis draws on and contributes to the international literature on young people and social change.

Readers seeking a historical and cross-cultural treatment of marriage and the family will not be disappointed by this book. A readable and comprehensive account of marriage, rich in colorful social history, Quale's work excels in the comparison of lines of development among the foremost cultures of the world. Particularly impressive in this regard is her treatment of the Eastern civilizations and how these differed from what demographic historians have come to call the `West European pattern' of marriage....Although written as a history, this book should be of interest to students of the family in the social sciences. While it is not a path-breaking work in the sense of providing significant novel conceptual or theoretical insights, it skillfully incorporates theoretical and empirical contributions from a multitude of disciplines. It devotes considerable attention to contemporary trends and consistently relates the institution of the family to the overall socioeconomic, political, and demographic contingencies within society....Quale has written an important book that contains a wealth of useful informaton and deserves serious consideration for use in graduate and undergraduate instruction. Journal of Marriage and the Family This is the first general worldwide history of marriage systems. Though it is comprehensive, it also uses contemporary American trends to illustrate broader tendencies in significant and sometimes dramatic ways. After going back to the earliest generations of human life to seek the roots of why and how human beings came to marry, it explores the various points in family life at which marriages are made, dissolved, and remade. It treats marriage systems as a basis for understanding how not only families, but whole societies operate. The functioning of a marriage system is perceived to be fully related to the overall economic and political situation within which families and individuals must make their way. The overall situation is looked at in a historical context, reflecting a condition of constant change. Quale traces the gradual modifications in patterns through the rise of agriculture and herding into commercial-urban societies and on to contemporary industrial-commercial life, comparing lines of development in the major regions of the world.

This book offers a practical, methodological guide to conducting arts-based research with children by drawing on five years of the authors' experience carrying out arts-based research with children in Australia and the UK. Based on the Australian Research Council-funded Interfaith Childhoods project, the authors describe methods of engaging communities and making data with children that foreground children's experiences and worldviews through making, being with, and viewing art. Framing these methods of doing, seeing, being, and believing through art as modes of understanding children's strategies for negotiating personal identities and values, this book explores the value of arts-based research as a means of obtaining complex information about children's life worlds that can be difficult to express verbally.

Combining visual and literary analyses and original ethnographic studies as part of a more general political reflection, Migration in the Making of Gulf Space examines the role of migrants and non-citizens in the processes of settling in the Arab States of the Gulf region. The contributions underscore the aspirational character of the Gulf as a place where migrant recognition can be attained while also reflecting on practices of exclusion. The book is the result of an interdisciplinary dialogue among scholars and includes an original contribution by the acclaimed author of the novel Temporary People, Deepak Unnikrishnan.

Juxtaposing contributions from geneticists and anthropologists, this volume provides a contemporary overview of cousin marriage and what is happening at the interface of public policy, the management of genetic risk and changing cultural practices in the Middle East and in multi-ethnic Europe. It offers a cross-cultural exploration of practices of cousin marriage in the light of new genetic understanding of consanguineous marriage and its possible health risks. Overall, the volume presents a reflective, interdisciplinary analysis of the social and ethical issues raised by both the discourse of risk in cousin marriage, as well as existing and potential interventions to promote "healthy consanguinity" via new genetic technologies.

How do we choose a partner to initiate a relationship with, and what makes us stay in a given relationship over time? These questions are most often pursued by scholars with an emphasis on the internal thoughts, feelings, and motivations of individual decision-makers. Conversely, this volume highlights the importance of considering external influences on individual decision-making in close relationships. Featuring contributions from internationally renowned scholars, the volume is divided into two interrelated sections. The first section considers global and societal influences on romantic relationships and the second section focuses on social network and communicative influences on romantic relationships. Taken together, this collection helps us to better understand how external factors influence the internal machinations of those involved in intimate relationships.