Professor Kent is concerned with one of the major questions posed by historical research on the later Middle Ages and the Renaissance: did these periods witness the nuclearization of the aristocratic ...family? Considering three celebrated and representative Florentineottimatilineages, the author reconstructs the histories and activities of scores of their households for the period circa 1420-1550.
The author describes the nuclear and extended households and the acknowledgement of kinship among the men and separate households of each patrilineage. His analysis indicates that the nuclear family and the clan cannot justifiably be regarded as opposing forms of family organization, each representative of a distinct historical era and social ambience. Professor Kent's study places Renaissance individualism in a wider, more corporate social context than that in which it has been traditionally viewed by historians.
Originally published in 1977.
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This study uses nationally representative longitudinal data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, to examine the prevalence and predictors of extended family households among children in the ...United States and to explore variation by race/ethnicity and socio-economic status (SES). Findings suggest that extended family households are a common living arrangement for children, with 35 per cent of youth experiencing this family structure before age 18. Racial/ethnic and SES differences are substantial: 57 per cent of Black and 35 per cent of Hispanic children ever live in an extended family, compared with 20 per cent of White children. Further, 47 per cent of children whose parents did not finish high school spend time in an extended family, relative to 17 per cent of children whose parents earned a bachelor's degree or higher. Models of predictors show that transitions into extended families are largely a response to social and economic needs.
While some research on entrepreneurship in family businesses has focused on transgenerational value creation, a gap exists in understanding how such value is generated across generations. The present ...research offers insights through the lens of dynamic capabilities, which are created by knowledge and in turn generate entrepreneurial performance and value creation. A model is built based on literature and case research. The crucial role of the organizational culture emerges through the empirical study. Family inertia is considered to be a factor preventing the creation of dynamic capabilities. We find that family inertia depends on characteristics of the family business culture, where paternalism and entrepreneurial orientation influence family inertia positively and negatively, respectively. Family firms from Switzerland and Italy active in the beverage industry represent the empirical context. Theoretical and practical implications are offered.
We examine older partnered parents' time spent with adult children in biological and step families, treating time together as an indication of relationship strength. Using a unique national sample of ...U.S. time diaries from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, we investigate time with all adult children combined and with each adult child. We find that time together depends on family structure and parent–adult child dyadic relationship type embedded in family structure. In analyses of all adult children combined, an older parent is more likely to spend time with adult children in biological families than in stepfamilies only when there is no shared biological child in the stepfamily. In dyadic analyses, a parent's tie with an adult child who is a biological child of both partners is stronger in stepfamilies than in biological families. Moreover, among stepfamilies, ties are not uniformly stronger with biological children relative to stepchildren; differences emerge only in more complex families when each partner has biological children from previous relationships. Our findings challenge the view that ties with older parents are always weaker with stepchildren in stepfamilies and point to the importance of considering parent–child relationships in the broader family context.
This book examines the needs, aspirations, strategies, and challenges of transnational Muslim migrants in Europe with regard to family practices such as marriage, divorce, and parenting. Critically ...re-conceptualizing ‘wellbeing’ and unpacking its multiple dimensions in the context of Muslim families, it investigates how migrants make sense of and draw on different norms, laws, and regimes of knowledge as they navigate different aspects of family relations and life in a transnational social space.
Positive relationships with family, friends and school staff are consistently linked with health and wellbeing during adolescence, though fewer studies explore how these micro-systems interact to ...influence adolescent health. This study tests the independent and interacting roles of family, peer and school relationships in predicting substance use, subjective wellbeing and mental health symptoms among 11–16 year olds in Wales. It presents cross-sectional analyses of the 2013 Health Behaviour in School-aged Children survey, completed by 9055 young people aged 11–16 years. Multilevel logistic regression analyses are used to test associations of family communication, family support, relationships with school staff, school peer connectedness, and support from friends, with tobacco use, cannabis use, alcohol use, subjective wellbeing and mental health symptoms. Positive relationships with family and school staff were consistently associated with better outcomes. Support from friends was associated with higher use of all substances, while higher school peer connectedness was associated with better subjective wellbeing and mental health. Better relationships with school staff were most strongly associated with positive subjective wellbeing, and fewer mental health symptoms where pupils reported less family support. Support from friends was associated with higher cannabis use and worse mental health among pupils with lower family support. Relationships with family and school staff may be important in protecting young people against substance use, and improving wellbeing and mental health. Interventions focused on student-staff relationships may be important for young people with less family support. Interventions based on peer support should be mindful of potential harmful effects for pupils with less support from family.
Changes in the American family that separate marriage and child-rearing--high percentages of children born outside of marriage, cohabiting relationships, the instability of marriages--have made ...families of the twenty-first century more complex than the idealized vision of a married mother and father living together with their biological children. Children may have multiple adults who act as parents at different points in their life. Grandparents are likely to live to see their grandchildren become young adults, so that there are more overlapping generations in families than ever before. And children have step and half siblings, some of whom live together for a time during childhood, and some of whom never share a household. Americans' more complicated family lives may be fraying the family safety net that protects vulnerable children. Why is this important? Many U.S. policies assume that family members will step in to help each other weather economic hardship and health crises. The family safety net has been reasonably effective, with grandparents helping to care for young children (Luo et al. 2012; Seltzer and Yahirun, forthcoming), and spouses and adult children providing care when family members develop infirmities in later life (McGarry 1998). The unpaid care that family members provide is economically valuable (Folbre 2012). Any threat to the viability of family care may be harmful for those in need. Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Inc., copyright The American Academy of Political and Social Science.
Food is fundamental to health and social participation, yet food poverty has increased in the global North. Adopting a realist ontology and taking a comparative case approach, Families and Food in ...Hard Times addresses the global problem of economic retrenchment and how those most affected are those with the least resources. Based on research carried out with low-income families with children aged 11-15, this timely book examines food poverty in the UK, Portugal and Norway in the decade following the 2008 financial crisis. It examines the resources to which families have access in relation to public policies, local institutions and kinship and friendship networks, and how they intersect. Through ‘thick description’ of families’ everyday lives, it explores the ways in which low income impacts upon practices of household food provisioning, the types of formal and informal support on which families draw to get by, the provision and role of school meals in children’s lives, and the constraints upon families’ social participation involving food. Providing extensive and intensive knowledge concerning the conditions and experiences of low-income parents as they endeavour to feed their families, as well as children’s perspectives of food and eating in the context of low income, the book also draws on the European social science literature on food and families to shed light on the causes and consequences of food poverty in austerity Europe.
Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people face the same family issues as their heterosexual counterparts, but that is only the beginning of their struggle. The LGBT community also encounters ...legal barriers to government recognition of their same-sex relationships and relationships to their own children. Policy Issues Affecting Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Families addresses partner recognition, parenting, issues affecting children of LGBT parents, health care, discrimination, senior care and elder rights, and equal access to social services. Sean Cahill and Sarah Tobias provide up-to-date, accurate analysis of the major policies affecting LGBT people, their same-sex partners, and their children. This valuable resource offers literature reviews of demographic research as well as original research based on the U.S. Census same-sex couple sample. It also provides a look at the 30-year history of right-wing anti-gay activism and the intra-community intellectual debates over the fight for marriage.
Guided by emotional security theory, this study examined the family-level antecedents of children's reaction patterns to interparental conflict in a sample of 243 preschool children (M age = 4.60 ...years; 48% Black; 16% Latinx; 56% girls) and their parents in the Northeastern United States. Behavioral observations of children's responses to interparental conflict over two annual measurement occasions assessed their tendencies to exhibit four patterns of defending against threat: secure (i.e., efficiently address direct threats), mobilizing (i.e., high reactivity to potential threat and social opportunities), dominant (i.e., directly defeat threat), and demobilizing (i.e., reduce salience as a target of hostility). Latent profile analyses of interparental, coparental, and parent characteristics derived from multiple methods at the first wave yielded four profiles corresponding with harmonious, enmeshed, compensatory, and detouring patterns of family-level functioning. Additional analyses revealed that children in harmonious and compensatory family profiles exhibited more secure patterns of reactivity over a 1-year period than children in the enmeshed family profile. In contrast, subsequent mobilizing reactivity was most pronounced for children in the enmeshed family profile. Finally, children in the detouring profile exhibited substantially higher levels of demobilizing reactivity to interparental conflict. Results are discussed in the context of how they inform and refine emotional security theory.
Public Significance Statement
This study suggests that there are distinct profiles of family functioning (i.e., interparental and parent-child qualities) that precede changes in children's patterns of behavioral reactivity to conflict between their parents. Because children's patterns of reactivity to conflict predict their mental health outcomes, understanding the family antecedents may help advance clinical targets and tools designed to promote children's coping and adjustment.