Although much is written about contemporary families, the focus is typically limited to marriage and parenting. In this path-breaking assessment of families sociologist Robert M. Milardo demonstrates ...how aunts and uncles contribute to the daily lives of parents and their children. Aunts and uncles complement the work of parents, sometimes act as second parents, and sometimes form entirely unique brands of intimacy grounded in a lifetime of shared experiences. The Forgotten Kin explores how aunts and uncles support parents, buffer the relationships of parents and children, act as family historians, and develop lifelong friendships with parents and their children. The book details the routine activities of aunts and uncles, the features of families that encourage closeness, how aunts and uncles go about mentoring nieces and nephews, and how adults are mentored by the very children for whom they are responsible. This book aims to change the public discourse on families and the involvement of the forgotten kin across generations and households.
Reassesses thirty years of domestic violence research and demonstrates three forms of partner violence, distinctive in their origins, effects, and treatments
Domestic violence, a serious and ...far-reaching social problem, has generated two key debates among researchers. The first debate is about gender and domestic violence. Some scholars argue that domestic violence is primarily male-perpetrated, others that women are as violent as men in intimate relationships. Johnson’s response to this debate—and the central theme of this book—is that there is more than one type of intimate partner violence. Some studies address the type of violence that is perpetrated primarily by men, while others are getting at the kind of violence that women areinvolved in as well. Because there has been no theoretical framework delineating types of domestic violence, researchers have easily misread one another’s studies.
The second major debate involves how many women are abused each year by their partners. Estimates range from two to six million. Johnson’s response once again comes from this book’s central theme. If there is more than one type of intimate partner violence, then the numbers depend on what type you’re talking about.
Johnson argues that domestic violence is not a unitary phenomenon. Instead, he delineates three major, dramatically different, forms of partner violence: intimate terrorism, violent resistance, and situational couple violence. He roots the conceptual distinctions among the forms of violence in an analysis of the role of power and control in relationship violence and shows that the failure to make these basic distinctions among types of partner violence has produced a research literature that is plagued by both overgeneralizations and ostensibly contradictory findings. This volume begins the work of theorizing forms of domestic violence, a crucial first step to a better understanding of these phenomena among scholars, social scientists, policy makers, and service providers.
Since 2000, approximately 440,000 Mexicans have migrated to the United States every year. Tens of thousands have left children behind in Mexico to do so. For these parents, migration is a sacrifice. ...What do parents expect to accomplish by dividing their families across borders? How do families manage when they are living apart? More importantly, do parents' relocations yield the intended results? Probing the experiences of migrant parents, children in Mexico, and their caregivers, Joanna Dreby offers an up-close and personal account of the lives of families divided by borders. What she finds is that the difficulties endured by transnational families make it nearly impossible for parents' sacrifices to result in the benefits they expect. Yet, paradoxically, these hardships reinforce family members' commitments to each other. A story both of adversity and the intensity of family ties, Divided by Borders is an engaging and insightful investigation of the ways Mexican families struggle and ultimately persevere in a global economy.
Synthesizing current literature with information obtained through interviews of adoptive, gay and lesbian, and multiracial families, this book is designed to help practitioners work with diverse ...families. An introduction explores the concept of a "normal family" and provides an overview of the book and a description of the interview process. The first chapter, "Diverse Families in Context," provides an overview of diverse families. The next three chapters explore adoptive families: (1) "About Adoption: The Participants in Context" discusses different types of adoptions; (2) "Adapting to Adoption over the Life Span" discusses birth parents, adoptees, and adoptive parents; and (3) "Treatment Issues Pertaining to Adoption" considers infertility, assessment of adoption issues, and treatment and therapist issues. The next three chapters explore homosexual families: (1) "About Homosexuality: The Participants in Context" considers gays and lesbians from a scientific and social historical context, compares heterosexual and homosexual couples and gay and lesbian relationships, and discusses gay and lesbian parenting and its impact on child development; (2) "Homosexuality over the Life Span" talks about lesbian and gay identity formation, the coming-out process, and gay and lesbian couples and families; and (3) "Treatment Issues Pertaining to Homosexuality" discusses therapists' homophobia and other treatment and therapist issues. The next three chapters explore multiracial families: (1) "About Multiraciality: The Participants in Context" gives historical and political background, discusses social science theories about interracial marriage, and talks about race and racism, issues confronting biracial couples and their children, and transracial adoption; (2) "Multiraciality across the Life Span" presents racial identity theories and identity formation of interracial couples and of transracial adoptees and their families; and (3) "Treatment Issues Pertaining to Interracial Couples and Families" discusses therapists' racism and treatment issues with biracial couples, families, and transracial adoptive families. The next chapter, "Emerging Families," discusses single parents by choice, grandparent-led families, and families by artificial reproductive technology. Extensive resources are listed at the end of the book. Contains 408 references. (LPP)
This review examines research on immigrant families in the United States from the past decade from multiple disciplinary perspectives. This work has used variations on assimilation and acculturation ...perspectives. In the case of the assimilation perspectives, the focus has largely been on family formation, whereas research using acculturation perspectives has focused more on intrafamily relationships. But, over the course of the decade, an interesting integrative model has emerged to address interactions of attitudes and values with structural conditions in the receiving and sending communities. Some of this effort to integrate perspectives can be found in studies of transnational families. The review concludes with some suggestions for continuing this integration and expanding studies to include dynamics of migration and family processes simultaneously.
This is a comprehensive handbook, full of vital information on the theory and practice of infant-parent psychotherapy, that will revolutionise the treatment of babies. It is essential reading for all ...professionals working with children.
This volume is based upon the author’s observations and treatment of over 3,500 parents and their infants throughout several decades. With its roots in the major fields of psychology, such as developmental psychology and psychoanalysis of early life, she has created an exciting and ground-breaking new field of psychoanalytic psychotherapy - infant-parent psychotherapy. It focuses on pre-verbal communication with babies, using the simple tools of experience and observation. In the first chapters, the history and background of infant-parent psychotherapy are laid out. Then, its application to understanding babies is detailed, demonstrating the psychodynamic approach in theory and in practice. Once the basics are explained, the author presents a step-by-step guide on how to assess, diagnose and treat babies, including case studies for practical illustration. She also provides separate chapters on special needs babies and troubled mothers, again using case studies for examples. Quick reference tables, maps, matrices and indexes are provided at the back of the book.
This book brings together leading experts' latest research in the field of family tourism by adding to its underdeveloped knowledge base. It underlines the infancy of academic family tourism research ...that belies its market importance and directs towards future implications and theoretical debates about the place of families within tourism.
This article discusses the diversity of family policy models in 28 OECD countries in terms of the balance between their different objectives and the mix of instruments adopted to implement the ...policies. Cross-country policy differences are investigated by applying a principal component analysis to comprehensive country-level data from the OECD Family Database covering variables such as parental leave conditions, childcare service provision, and financial support to families. The results find persistent differences in the family policy patterns embedded in different contexts of work-family "outcomes." Country classifications of family policy packages only partially corroborate categorizations in earlier studies, owing to considerable within-group heterogeneity and the presence of group outliers. The Nordic countries outdistance the others with comprehensive support to working parents with very young children. Anglo-Saxon countries provide much less support for working parents with very young children, and financial support is targeted on low-income and large families and focuses on preschool and early elementary education. Continental and Eastern European countries form a more heterogeneous group, while the support received by families in Southern Europe and in Asian countries is much lower in all its dimensions.
Producing Culture and Capital is a major theoretical contribution to the anthropological literature on capitalism, as well as a rich case study of kinship and gender relations in northern Italy. ...Drawing on ethnographic and archival research on thirty-eight firms in northern Italy's silk industry, Sylvia Yanagisako illuminates the cultural processes through which sentiments, desires, and commitments motivate and shape capitalist family firms. She shows how flexible specialization is produced through the cultural dynamics of capital accumulation, management succession, firm expansion and diversification, and the reproduction and division of firms. In doing so, Yanagisako addresses two gaps in Marx's and Weber's theories of capitalism: the absence of an adequate cultural theory of capitalist motivation and the absence of attention to kinship and gender. By demonstrating that kinship and gender are crucial in structuring capitalist action, this study reveals these two gaps to be different facets of the same omission. A process-oriented approach to class formation and class subjectivity enables the author to incorporate the material and ideological struggles within families into an analysis of class-making and self-making. Yanagisako concludes that both "provincial" and "global" capitalist orientations and strategies operate in an industry that has always been integrated into regional and international relations of production and distribution. Her approach to culture and capitalism as mutually constituted processes offers an alternative to both universal models of capitalism as a mode of production and essentialist models of distinctive "cultures of capitalism."
Research on family background and educational success focuses almost exclusively on two generations: parents and children. This study argues that the extended family contributes significantly to the ...total effect of family background on educational success. Analyses using the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study show that, net of family factors shared by siblings from the same immediate family, factors shared by first cousins account for a nontrivial part of the total variance in children's educational success. Results also show that grandparents', aunts', and uncles' socioeconomic characteristics have few direct effects on educational success. Furthermore, resources in the extended family compensate for lacking resources in low-SES families, which in turn promote children's educational success. The main conclusion is that the total effect of family background on educational success originates in the immediate family, the extended family, and in interactions between these two family environments.
