Family Sociology

Eigentlich hatte Didier Eribon sich vorgenommen, ab jetzt regelmäßig nach Fismes zu fahren. Doch seine Mutter stirbt wenige Wochen nach ihrem Umzug in ein Pflegeheim in dem kleinen Ort in der Champagne. Wie in Rückkehr nach Reims wird dieser Einschnitt zum Ausgangspunkt für eine Reise in die Vergangenheit. Eribon rekonstruiert die von Knappheit und Zwängen bestimmte Biografie einer Frau, die an einen brutalen Ehemann gekettet blieb und sich sogar in ihren Träumen bescheiden musste. "Meine Mutter", hält er fest, "war ihr ganzes Leben lang unglücklich."

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.

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.

Two days before Shea and Larami Serrano were to be married, four months into her pregnancy with twin boys, she went into labor. Stuck in a hospital room, fearing the worst, and dismantling a year’s worth of preparations in a matter of hours - the couple decides that the show must go on. Told from Shea’s and Larami’s dual perspectives, this memoir shows the powerful bond that can arise from adversity, a sense of humor, and mutual trust.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Women in today's advanced capitalist societies are encouraged to "lean in." The media and government champion women's empowerment. In a cultural climate where women can seemingly have it all, why do so many successful professional women - lawyers, financial managers, teachers, engineers, and others - give up their careers after having children and become stay-at-home mothers? How do they feel about their decision and what do their stories tell us about contemporary society?

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.

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.

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.

Oggi i nonni sono più importanti che nel passato: vivono di più e in buona salute e quindi si allungano gli anni di vita condivisa con le generazioni più giovani; le relazioni con i nipoti diventano più strette e affettuose, fondandosi su un rapporto di cura che permette anche alle madri di lavorare fuori casa; infine i nonni rappresentano spesso un ancoraggio sicuro nei momenti di crisi e cambiamento della famiglia, come una separazione, un divorzio, una migrazione.

All families have secrets but the facts requiring secrecy change with time. Nowadays a lesbian partnership, a "bastard" son, or a criminal grandfather might be of little or no consequence but could have unraveled a family at an earlier moment in history. Margaret K. Nelson is interested in how families keep secrets from each other and from outsiders when to do otherwise would risk eliciting not only embarrassment or discomfort, but profound shame and, in some cases, danger.

Education, employment, and home ownership have long been considered stepping stones to the middle class. But in Abandoned Families, social policy expert Kristin Seefeldt shows how many working families have access only to a separate but unequal set of poor-quality jobs, low-performing schools, and declining housing markets, which offer few chances for upward mobility. Through in-depth interviews over a six-year period with women in Detroit, Seefeldt charts the increasing social isolation of many low-income workers.

The Hilarious Truth about Parenting, Children and Relationships is a laugh-out-loud journey through the chaos, hilarity, and occasional wisdom of growing up in a family full of rules, traditions, and those all-too-familiar phrases we swore we’d never repeat (Spoiler alert: We repeat them).