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.
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.
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.
Available Open Access under CC-BY-NC licence. Single parents face a triple bind of inadequate resources, employment, and policies, which in combination further complicate their lives.
This book - ...multi-disciplinary and comparative in design - shows evidence from over 40 countries, along with detailed case studies of Sweden, Iceland, Scotland, and the UK. It covers aspects of well-being that include poverty, good quality jobs, the middle class, wealth, health, children's development and performance in school, and reflects on social justice.
Leading international scholars challenge our current understanding of what works and draw policy lessons on how to improve the well-being of single parents and their children.
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.
This 4-year, multi-informant longitudinal study (N = 480, initial age: 15) investigated the interplay between parental support, behavioral and psychological control, and adolescents' emotion ...regulation development. We examined reciprocal effects between parents and children, mothers' versus fathers' unique roles in emotion regulation development, and sex differences. Multi-informant data allowed us to compare effects of adolescent-perceived and parent-reported parenting. Finally, innovative analyses allowed us to disentangle between-family differences from within-family predictive processes. Parenting and emotion regulation were associated at the between-family and within-family levels, especially according to adolescent reports. Support primarily played a role between mothers and adolescents, and perceived behavioral control between fathers and adolescents. Sex moderation revealed that support played a more prominent role in mother-daughter than mother-son relationships, and that daughters experienced greater behavioral control. Child effects outnumbered parent effects, which might reflect the increasing equality of adolescent-parent relationships. Finally, adolescent-perceived parenting was a stronger correlate of emotion regulation than parent-reports, suggesting that adolescents' perceptions are a relevant source of information for research and practice. Consistent with the self-determination theory perspective on parenting, emotion regulation flourished when adolescents felt like mothers provided support, and fathers loosened behavioral control. These results are in line with the notion that mother-child relationships are supportive attachment relationships, whereas fathers provide "activation" relationships, challenging adolescents to regulate emotions autonomously by providing less explicit structure.