Changing Families

Provides advice on coping with such family changes as separation, divorce, remarriage, new family members, and new schools.

All families change over time. Sometimes a baby is born, or a grown-up gets married. And sometimes a child gets a new foster parent or a new adopted mom or dad. Children need to know that when this happens, it’s not their fault. They need to understand that they can remember and value their birth family and love their new family, too. Straightforward words and full-color illustrations offer hope and support for children facing or experiencing change. Includes resources and information for birth parents, foster parents, social workers, counselors, and teachers.

This is a case study of the shifting boundary between family and state in Britain from the mid 1970s to 1990. The book describes a variety of family centres and shows how they have responded to the crises in child welfare and social work. The book also considers the issues of gender in policy.

In a previous volume, Families as Learning Environments for Children, we presented a series of chapters that dealt with research programs on the role of families as learning environments for children. Those studies were based on empirical data and sought answers to basic research questions, with no explicit concern for the application of the results to practical problems. Rather, their purpose was to contribute primarily to conceptualization, research methodology, and psychological theory. Now, in this volume, we turn our attention to intervention-efforts to modify the way a family develops. As in our previous conference, the participants of the working conference on which the present volume is based are research scientists and scholars interested in application. This group is distinct from practitioners, however, whose primary focus is service; participants in this conference have as their primary interest research into the problems of processes of application. Applied professional issues concerning the lives of families come from many varied sources, from some that are distant and impersonal (e. g. , the law) to direct face-to-face efforts (educators, therapists). The variety of sources and types of applications are eloquent testimony to the degree to which families are subject to a host of societal forces whose implicit or explicit aim is to modify family functioning. For example, some educators may wish to alter family child-rearing patterns to enhance child development; the clinician seeks to help families come to terms and to cope with a schizophrenic child. The list can be extended.

Recent decades have seen spectacular increases in the levels of divorce and separation across the Western world. This important development is having a radical impact on the conduct and nature of family relationships. This book offers an original investigation of these critical transformations through an ethnographic analysis of post-divorce family life in Britain and provides insightful answers to vexing questions, such as:- What cultural values and ideologies motivate and shape concerns over relationships when marriage ends?- Which relationships continue and why?- What cultural values underpin the financial transactions that take place or (more commonly) fail to take place after divorce?Drawing on extensive interviews with those most affected by divorce, the author argues that the positive sentiments traditionally associated with the notion of kinship are wholly inadequate when it comes to understanding divorce, but that kinship can provide an illuminating window through which to consider the breakdown of marital relations.This book represents a significant contribution to current debates over the changing form and expression of relationships in Western society in the late twentieth century.

This book offers an up-to-the-moment assessment of the condition of the American family in an era of growing inequality.

With debates about the quality of school meals, high-profile attempts to improve people's cooking skills and widespread concern about growing obesity rates, a reassessment of family eating habits has never been a more topical. 'Changing Families, Changing Food' addresses key concerns.

This volume explores attitudes and beliefs concerning intergenerational family responsibilities with special focus on families affected by divorce and/or remarriage. For developmentalists, family studies specialists, sociologists, and policy makers.

This volume comprises contributions from several fields of study in the social sciences. The different disciplinary angles intersect at the level of the research subjects: families, households and consumers. Together they reflect a broad field of study that always had its particular niche in Wageningen as ‘household and consumer studies’. The five separate parts: the formation and dissolution of families; stratification and inequality; consumer and household behaviour; leisure time; and hygiene, health and society, nicely reflect the broadness of this field. The eighteen contributions in this volume were purposefully selected, not only based on their contents and quality, but also because of their relationship to the work of Kees de Hoog, who retired this year. Although Kees de Hoog is a professor of family sociology and family policy, his work throughout the years has extended far beyond that and covers the fields that are captured by the different parts in this book. Therefore the contributions in this volume comprise an interesting read for scholars all over the world who have an interest in families, consumers, households, and the ways they interface.