Family Sociology

Americans hold marriage in such high esteem that we push people toward it, reward them for taking part in it, and fetishize its benefits to the point that we routinely ignore or excuse bad behavior and societal ills in the name of protecting and promoting it. Through revealing storytelling, Zug builds a compelling case that when marriage is touted as “the solution” to such problems, it absolves the government, and society, of the responsibility for directly addressing them.

In this memoir of identity and discovery, Vanessa A. Bee explores the way we define "home" and "belonging"—from her birth in Yaounde, Cameroon, to her adoption, to experiencing housing insecurity in Europe and her eventual immigration to the US. After her parents' divorce, Vanessa traveled with her mother to Lyon and later to London, eventually settling in Reno, Nevada, as a teenager, right around the financial crisis and the collapse of the housing market. At 20, still a practicing evangelical Christian and newly married, Vanessa applied to and was accepted by Harvard Law School.

Why is it that children in a family can share the same gene pool, a similar socio-economic environment and experience similar parenting styles yet have fundamentally different personalities, interests and even different careers as adults? Birth order! The implications for parents, teachers and adults involved with children are many. First published in 2003 to great acclaim, this fully revised and updated edition seeks to increase the listener's understanding of birth order theory.

The Recovery of Family Life defends marriage and family life while exposing the limits and blind spots in these powerful revolutionary ideologies. After suggesting a general framework within which to understand the ends and means of family policy, Scott Yenor explores what a liberal society should seek to accomplish in marriage and family policy.

Where the Wild Things Were centers on the exploding, contentious national conversation about the nature of childhood and parenting in the postwar US emblematized by Dr. Spock's Baby and Child Care. Renowned scholar Henry Jenkins demonstrates that the language that shaped a growing field of advice literature for parents also informed the period's fictions—in film, television, and elsewhere—produced for and consumed by children.

As a lucid, easily listenable, and objective legal exposition, Rev. Matthew Iwuji's Marriage Form in Nigeria becomes an important channel for the knowledge of the legal requirements for a valid contract of marriage in Nigeria, and it is a valuable contribution to the development and clarification of Nigerian family law.

夫婦の間にたちはだかる高くて厚い「壁」ーー

12歳までは子ども脳、15歳からはおとな脳。13歳から15歳の間の3年間は、脳の移行期に当たる。思春期の脳は不安定で制御不能のポンコツ装置。

El «amor triste» y trágico surge cuando pensamos que el amor es sinónimo de felicidad, y esta sinónimo de bienestar inmediato. El amor que defiende Jenkins va mucho más allá, porque rompe el tablero de juego tradicional y establece otras coordenadas. Contra la visión romántica, Jenkins propone un amor «eudaimónico» o de los «buenos espíritus». Es decir, que no debemos buscar nuestra media naranja en algún lugar del mundo, sino generar relaciones que nos hagan mejores; rodearnos, en suma, de buenos espíritus que contribuyan al florecimiento personal y al desarrollo de nuestras capacidades.

Low-wage workers make up the largest group of employed parents in the United States, yet scant attention has been given to their experiences as new mothers and fathers. Work Matters brings the unique stories of these diverse individuals to light. Drawing on years of research and more than fifteen hundred family interviews, Maureen Perry-Jenkins describes how new parents cope with the demands of infant care while holding down low-wage, full-time jobs, and she considers how managing all of these responsibilities have long-term implications for child development.

Welcome to Atheden. This is now our new Utopian society. It is as fast as the turtle but always wins the race. It is not said to be this or that but instead develops from within and reaches out into all of society. Among its beautiful and never ending gardens you will come to understand its nature which will persuade your feet to align within its circle, because you will come to understand that your nature derives from It. This will result in your passion, desire, and dedication to exist as and within the highest form of It understood and actualized into your existence.

Parents everywhere want their children to be happy and do well. Yet how parents seek to achieve this ambition varies enormously. Through personal anecdotes and original research, Matthias Doepke and Fabrizio Zilibotti reveal that in countries with increasing economic inequality, such as the United States, parents push harder to ensure their children have a path to security and success.

Striking the right balance between career and motherhood is one of the most stressful, heart-wrenching tasks facing women today. In Torn, 46 women examine the conflict between the need to nurture and the need to work, and reveal creative solutions for having the best of both worlds. The stories in the collection offer hope and inspiration, but they also reveal the messy realities of modern motherhood and life's inevitable crises, both small and large.

The fifth of eight children, Chris Forhan was born into a family of silence. He and his siblings learned, without being told, that certain thoughts and feelings were not to be shared. On the evenings his father didn't come home, the rest of the family would eat dinner without him, his whereabouts unknown, his absence pronounced but not mentioned. And on a cold night in 1973, just before Christmas, Forhan's father killed himself in the carport. Forty years later Forhan "bravely considers the way he is and is not his father's son" (Larry Watson).

När familjen Hagéus Schmidt får höra att deras semester i Thailand blivit förlängd med hela två dagar känns det som en dröm gått i uppfyllelse. Två extra dagar i paradiset. Väl inne på den sista semesterdagen står väskorna packade. Hela familjen är på stranden förutom pappa Bertil som ligger och vilar på rummet. Ett sista dopp i havet, tänker de och mamma Ann har de tre barnen med sig: Julius, Gösta och Karin. Plötsligt stiger vågorna och Bertil kommer springande. "Spring," skriker han.

US families have been pushed to the wall. At the bottom of the economic ladder, poor and working-class adults aren't forming stable relationships and can't give their kids the start they need because of low wages and uncertain job prospects. Toward the top, professional parents' lives have become a grinding slog of long hours of paid work. Meanwhile their kids are overstressed by pressure to succeed and get into good colleges.

In this profoundly important, inspirational book, Dan Quayle, America's 44th Vice President, introduces us to five American families who speak bluntly - and often poignantly - about the values that give them strength. Liberal and conservative; Christian and non-Christian; Black, White, and mixed race - these families till the rich Virginia soil, walk the streets of East L.A., grapple with single motherhood, confront racial hatred, and learn to live with disabilities. They are us.

The kinds of families we see today are different than they were even a decade ago, some fantastically so, as paths to parenthood have been rejiggered by technology, activism, and law. In Modern Families, Joshua Gamson brings us extraordinary family creation tales - his own included - that illuminate this changing world of contemporary kinship. We meet a child with two mothers, made with one mother's egg and the sperm of a man none of them has ever met and carried by the other mother.

What is a normal life, anyway? Perfect parents, who never argued or made a mistake? Some 2.2 perfectly behaved children who magically morphed into honor students, then doctors and lawyers with no problems, or nary a regret? All this, evolving from the safety of some picket fence inside the boundaries of which never a harsh word was spoken? How far back must you go in your family before hitting grief or hurt? Steve Watkins never knew what to call it, but he knew something about growing up on a small rural farm in the 1980s felt different. Something strange and out of the ordinary.

Genitori in coppia, coniugata e di fatto, più di due genitori, un figlio ad ogni costo, genitori omosessuali: diversi modi di essere madri e padri e una molteplicità di forme di famiglia.