This important new book is a comparative study of social mobility based on qualitative interviews with middle-class parents in America and Britain. It addresses the key issue in stratification ...research, namely, the stability of class relations and middle-class reproduction. Drawing on interviewee accounts of how parents mobilised economic, cultural and social resources to help them into professional careers, it then considers how the interviewees, as parents, seek to increase their children's chances of educational success and occupational advancement. Middle-class parents may try to secure their children's social position but it is not an easy or straightforward affair. With the decline of the quality of state education and increased job insecurity in the labour market since the 1970s and 1980s, the reproduction of advantage is more difficult than in the affluent decades of the 1950s and 1960s. The implications for public policy, especially public investment in higher education, are considered.
Autism has attracted a great deal of attention in recent years, thanks to dramatically increasing rates of diagnosis, extensive organizational mobilization, journalistic coverage, biomedical ...research, and clinical innovation. Understanding Autism, a social history of the expanding diagnostic category of this contested illness, takes a close look at the role of emotion--specifically, of parental love--in the intense and passionate work of biomedical communities investigating autism.
This book documents the early lives of almost 19,000 children born in the UK at the start of the 21st century, and their families. It is the first time that analysis of data from the hugely important ...Millennium Cohort Study, a longitudinal study following the progress of the children and their families, has been drawn together in a single volume. The unrivalled data is examined here to address important policy and scientific issues. The book is also the first in a series of publications that will report on the children's lives at different stages of their development.
The fascinating range of findings presented here is strengthened by comparison with data on earlier generations. This has enabled the authors to assess the impact of a wide range of policies on the life courses of a new generation, including policies on child health, parenting, childcare and social exclusion.
Babies of the new millennium (title tbc) is the product of an exciting collaboration from experts across a wide range of health and social science fields. The result is a unique and authoritative analysis of family life and early childhood in the UK that cuts across old disciplinary boundaries. It is essential reading for academics, students and researchers in the health and social sciences. It will also be a useful resource for policy makers and practitioners who are interested in childhood, child development, child poverty, child health, childcare and family policy.
This book explores the experiences of LGBTQ+ parented families in school communities and provides a voice for this overlooked group who are becoming an increasingly common form of family diversity in ...school communities.
Approaching the topic from a strength-based psychological perspective, the book presents LGBTQ+ parents’ suggestions for school improvements and supportive structures and provides empirical evidence to inform future LGBTQ+ inclusive educational policy.
Research based yet practically focused, it will be a valuable resource for researchers, students and education professionals alike.
The decision to have a child is seldom a simple one, often fraught with complexities regarding emotional readiness, finances, marital status, and compatibility with life and career goals. Rarely, ...though, do individuals consider the role of the law in facilitating or inhibiting their ability to have a child or to parent. For LGBT individuals, however, parenting is saturated with legality - including the initial decision of whether to have a child, how to have a child, whether one's relationship with their child will be recognized, and everyday acts of parenting like completing forms or picking up children from school.
Through in-depth interviews with 137 LGBT parents, Amanda K. Baumle and D'Lane R. Compton examine the role of the law in the lives of LGBT parents and how individuals use the law when making decisions about family formation or parenting. Baumle and Compton explore the ways in which LGBT parents participate in the process of constructing legality through accepting, modifying, or rejecting legal meanings about their families. Few groups encounter as much variation in access to everyday legal rights pertaining to the family as do LGBT parents. This complexity and variation in legal environments provides a rather unique opportunity to examine the manner in which legal context affects the ways in which individuals come to understand the meaning and utility of the law for their lives. The authors conclude that legality is constructed through a complex interplay of legal context, social networks, individual characteristics, and familial desires. Ultimately, the stories of LGBT parents in this book reflect a rich and varied relationship between the law, the state, and the private family goals of individuals.
Tick Tock Breitbart, Vicki; Bauer-Maglin, Nan
2021, 2021-10-19
eBook
**AS SEEN IN THE NEW YORK TIMES, BITCH MAGAZINE, THE LA REVIEW OF BOOKS, LIT HUB, AND MORE**In this groundbreaking collection of essays, poems, and creative nonfiction, more than twenty-nine writers ...offer witty and incisive insight into the unique experience of being or having an older parent in today's world. By turns raw, funny, tender, and wise, these stories reshape our understanding of the social factors that impact later parenthood, honor the strength and resilience required to overcome countless challenges posed in healthcare and adoption settings, and relish in the many joys of a parent-child relationship, no matter what age. Writers, child development experts, and older parents themselves Vicki Breitbart and Nan Bauer-Maglin have curated a collection that truly affirms and destigmatizes the act of becoming a parent over 40, whether by choice or by chance.Contributors include New York Times bestselling author and National Book Award winner Elizabeth Acevedo; award-winning author Adam Berlin; writer and editor Laura Broadwell; author and editor Salma Abdelnour Gilman; professor and institute director Elizabeth Gregory; podcast producer and host Barbara Herel; author and research scholar Elline Lipkin; retired journalist Linda Wright Moore; founder and executive director of The Democracy Center Jim Shultz; and more.Tick Tock is a document, a community, a manual, a help line, a chorus of voices expressing the gamut of complicated emotions that accompany a person of a certain age contemplating the leap into parenthood. I wish this important book existed when I was at that crossroads, and am grateful for it today. -Michelle Tea, Against MemoirTick Tock reads like a wide-ranging chat with friends who ask 'What's your story?' These are human, lived tales that describe life-changing and interconnected issues-political, social, and personal. What a gift. -Judy Norsigian and Jane Pincus, Our Bodies, OurselvesTick Tock is an exquisite, understanding, and inclusive examination of the unique challenges and joys faced by older parents. An unforgettable book-undeniably important and a pleasure to read. -Beverly Gologorsky, Can You See the Wind?
When a parent dies, most adults are seized by an unexpected crisis that can trigger a profound transformation. Using in-depth interviews and national surveys, Dr Umberson explains why the death of a ...parent has strong effects on adults and looks at protective factors that help some individuals experience better mental health following the death than they did when the parent was alive. This is the first book to rely on sound scientific method to document the significant adverse effects of parental death for adults in a national population. Exploring the social and psychological risk factors that make some people more vulnerable than others, readers will come to view the loss of a parent in a new way: as a turning point in adult development.
In cities across the United States, affluent White newcomers are moving into historically Black neighborhoods, presenting both a challenge and an opportunity for public schools. In many cases, the ...newcomers either avoid their local schools or use their political power to push aside families who have lived in the neighborhood for years. But there's a third possibility, one that can bring greater equity, and that's the story of this book. At Brighter Choice Community School, a public elementary school in Brooklyn's rapidly gentrifying Bedford-Stuyvesant, a group of mostly Black parents, led by PTA president Keesha Wright-Sheppard, is learning to share the space with White newcomers. Outside the school, high rates of homelessness and a global pandemic that disproportionately hit people of color make it hard for children to succeed. Inside the school, hurt feelings and misunderstandings push parents apart. But the parents, working through conflicts to build a community of mutual trust and respect, are planting the seeds of interracial solidarity to fight for better schools for all. Whether these seeds flourish and grow depends on whether parents of all races, knowing the history of injustice and inequality, can learn to come together to overcome the past. Book Features: (1) Follows a multiracial group of parents, working with an energetic principal and staff, as they learn to bridge the deep divides of race and class; (2) Shows why school integration is so difficult to achieve, even in integrated neighborhoods; (3) Traces the roots of inequality and the history of failed school reforms to address it; (4) Incorporates social science research to show the impact of school and neighborhood conditions on academic achievement; (5) Argues that socioeconomic integration offers one of the best hopes for improving schools, but only if school leaders take care not to marginalize low-income children; and (6) Draws on interviews with parents and staff, school visits and observations, newspaper articles, scholarly books, and policy reports on school segregation.
China’s Revolutions and Intergenerational Relations counters the widely accepted notion that traditional family patterns are weakened by forces such as economic development and social revolutions. ...China has experienced wrenching changes on both the economic and the political fronts, yet from the evidence presented here the tradition of filial respect and support for aging parents remains alive and well. Using collaborative surveys carried out in 1994 in the middle-sized industrial city of Baoding and comparative data from urban Taiwan, the authors examine issues shaping the relationships between adult Chinese children and their elderly parents. The continued vitality of intergenerational support and filial obligations in these samples is not simply an instance of strong Confucian tradition trumping powerful forces of change. Instead, and somewhat paradoxically, the continued strength of filial obligations can be attributed largely to the institutions of Chinese socialism forged in the era of Mao Zedong. With socialist institutions now under assault in the People’s Republic of China, the future of intergenerational relations in the twenty-first century is once again uncertain.