This book examines military families' well-being and health outcomes by providing a critical theoretical perspective on their position and the risks and challenges affecting them. Authors explore the tension between demands made by two greedy institutions-the military and the family-and how the well-being of families is negotiated between the two. Uniquely, the book employs an integrative approach to observing and analyzing military-specific risk and protective factors for health outcomes of military families on various social-ecological levels, including relationship satisfaction and dissatisfaction, intimate partnership violence, parent-child relationships, child well-being, psychoactive substance abuse, depression, and PTSD. Throughout the chapters, the authors analyze research findings that reveal new health outcomes and present an empirically-tested model of military-specific risk and protective factors.

Fatherhood is in transition and being challenged by often contradictory forces: societal mandates to be both an active father and provider, men's own wish to be more involved with their children, and the institutional arrangements in which fathers work and live. This book explores these phenomena in the context of cross-national policies and their relation to the daily childcare practices of fathers. It presents the current state of knowledge on father involvement with young children in six countries from different welfare state regimes with unique policies related to parenting in general and fathers in particular: Finland, Germany, Italy, Slovenia, the UK and the USA.