The strengths of families from culture to culture, when compared to each other, are remarkably similar and give us common ground around the world upon which to unite and develop mutual understanding. ...Strengths-Based Research and Perspectives: Strong Families Around the World , provides a conceptual framework for global family strengths, discussing the diverse strengths and challenges that families face regardless of location. This book presents 43 expert authors from 18 countries in all seven major areas in the world who explain what it means to be a family in the context of their country and the challenges their country faces in the world today.
Focusing on the latest studies of similarities between strong families of different cultures, Strengths-Based Research and Perspectives: Strong Families Around the World presents a wide variety of disciplines, including family studies, family education, family therapy, modern languages, psychology, social work, sociology, cultural anthropology, and nursing. This insightful text centers on the Family Strengths Perspective, a paradigm that not only recognizes that there are problems in families today, but demonstrates clearly how these can be dealt with successfully. This valuable resource provides case study examples, quotations from literature and cultural mythology, tables, figures, and extensive references to give readers an in-depth understanding of the issues from strengths-based perspectives.
Topics in Strengths-Based Research and Perspectives: Strong Families Around the World include:
an introduction into the Family Strengths Perspective
the International Family Strengths Model
the propositions of the Family Strengths Perspective
how the Family Strengths Perspective fits with other conceptual frameworks
families from a global perspective
a conceptual framework for understanding global family strengths and challenges
Strengths-Based Research
Through nostalgic idealizations of motherhood, family, and the home, influential leaders in early twentieth-century America constructed and legitimated a range of reforms that promoted human ...reproduction. Their pronatalism emerged from a modernist conviction that reproduction and population could be regulated. European countries sought to regulate or encourage reproduction through legislation; America, by contrast, fostered ideological and cultural ideas of pronatalism through what Laura Lovett calls "nostalgic modernism," which romanticized agrarianism and promoted scientific racism and eugenics.Lovett looks closely at the ideologies of five influential American figures: Mary Lease's maternalist agenda, Florence Sherbon's eugenic "fitter families" campaign, George Maxwell's "homecroft" movement of land reclamation and home building, Theodore Roosevelt's campaign for conservation and country life, and Edward Ross's sociological theory of race suicide and social control. Demonstrating the historical circumstances that linked agrarianism, racism, and pronatalism, Lovett shows how reproductive conformity was manufactured, how it was promoted, and why it was coercive. In addition to contributing to scholarship in American history, gender studies, rural studies, and environmental history, Lovett's study sheds light on the rhetoric of "family values" that has regained currency in recent years.
Winner of the 2014 Outstanding Book Award presented by the Academy of Criminal Justice SciencesOver 2% of U.S.children under the age of 18more than 1,700,000 childrenhave a parent in prison. These ...children experience very real disadvantages when compared to their peers: they tend to experience lower levels of educational success, social exclusion, and even a higher likelihood of their own future incarceration. Meanwhile, their new caregivers have to adjust to their new responsibilities as their lives change overnight, and the incarcerated parents are cut off from their childrens development.Parental Incarceration and the Familybrings a family perspective to our understanding of what it means to have so many of our nations parents in prison. Drawing from the fields most recent research and the authors own fieldwork, Joyce Ardittioffers an in-depth look at how incarceration affects entire families: offender parents, children, and care-givers. Through the use of exemplars, anecdotes, and reflections, Joyce Arditti puts a human face on the mass of humanity behind bars, as well as those family members who are affected by a parents imprisonment. In focusing on offenders as parents, a radically different social policy agenda emergesone that calls for real reform and that responds to the collective vulnerabilities of the incarcerated and their kin.
In the Age of Revolution, how did American women conceive their lives and marital obligations? By examining the attitudes and behaviors surrounding the contentious issues of family, contraception, ...abortion, sexuality, beauty, and identity, Susan E. Klepp demonstrates that many women--rural and urban, free and enslaved--began to radically redefine motherhood. They asserted, or attempted to assert, control over their bodies, their marriages, and their daughters' opportunities.Late-eighteenth-century American women were among the first in the world to disavow the continual childbearing and large families that had long been considered ideal. Liberty, equality, and heartfelt religion led to new conceptions of virtuous, rational womanhood and responsible parenthood. These changes can be seen in falling birthrates, in advice to friends and kin, in portraits, and in a gradual, even reluctant, shift in men's opinions. Revolutionary-era women redefined femininity, fertility, family, and their futures by limiting births. Women might not have won the vote in the new Republic, they might not have gained formal rights in other spheres, but, Klepp argues, there was a women's revolution nonetheless.
Takes a comparative perspective on family life and childhood in the past half century in Russia and Eastern Europe, highlighting similarities and differences. Focuses on the problematic domains of ...the institutions and laws devised to cope with family difficulties, and discusses the social strains created by the transition from communist to post-communist national systems. In addition to the substantial historic analysis, actual challenges are also discussed. The essays examine the changing gender roles, alterations in legal systems, the burdens faced by married and unmarried women who are mothers, the contrasts between government rhteoric and the implementation of policies toward marriage, children and parenthood. By addressing the specifics of welfare politics under the Communist rule and the directions of their transformation in 1990–2000s, this book contributes to the understanding of social institutions and family policies in these countries and the problems of dealing with the socialist past that this region face.
Using as his example post-World War I Italy and the government's interest in the size, growth rate, and "vitality" of its national population, David Horn suggests a genealogy for our present ...understanding of procreation as a site for technological intervention and political contestation.Social Bodieslooks at how population and reproductive bodies came to be the objects of new sciences, technologies, and government policies during this period. It examines the linked scientific constructions of Italian society as a body threatened by the "disease" of infertility, and of women and men associalbodies--located neither in nature nor in the private sphere, but in that modern domain of knowledge and intervention carved out by statistics, sociology, social hygiene, and social work.
Situated at the intersection of anthropology, cultural studies, and feminist studies of science, the book explores the interrelated factors that produced the practices of reason we call social science and social planning. David Horn draws on many sources to analyze the discourses and practices of "social experts," the resistance these encountered, and the often unintended effects of the new objectification of bodies and populations. He shows how science, while affirming that maternity was part of woman's "nature," also worked to remove reproduction from the domain of the natural, making it an object of technological intervention. This reconstitution of bodies through the sciences and technologies of the social, Horn argues, continues to have material consequences for women and men throughout the West.
How do women choose between work and family commitments? And what are the causes, limits, and consequences of the "subtle revolution" in women's choices over the 1960s and 1970s? To answer these ...questions, Kathleen Gerson analyzes the experiences of a carefully selected group of middle-class and working-class women who were young adults in the 1970s. Their informative life histories reveal the emerging social forces in American society that have led today's women to face several difficult choices.
This article uses a differential salience-comparable salience approach to examine the effects of work demands and resources on work-to-family conflict and facilitation. The analysis is based on data ...from 1,938 employed adults living with a family member who were interviewed for the 1997 National Study of the Changing Workforce. The results support the differential salience approach by indicating that time- and strain-based work demands show relatively strong positive relationships to work-to-family conflict, whereas enabling resources and psychological rewards show relatively strong positive relationships to work-to-family facilitation. The availability of time-based family support policies and work-family organizational support is negatively related to conflict and positively related to facilitation, thereby supporting the comparable salience approach.
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.
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