Suchergebnisse

Developmental factors, family problems such as substance abuse, and other environmental variables, including violence, greatly affect the adjustment and coping of children and youth. Such variables can result in inaccurate assessments and diagnoses when young people are viewed in isolation from their situations and environments and when adult-oriented diagnostic tools are utilized. The authors describe the use of clinical interviews to provide more accurate diagnoses and strengths-oriented assessments for children and youth who receive case-management services from mental health centers. Implications for prevention and treatment are discussed.

"Conceiving of and representing mothers without their children seems so paradoxical as to be almost impossible. How can we define a mother in the absence of her child? This compelling volume explores these and other questions from a range of interdisciplinary perspectives, examining experiences, representations, creative manifestations, and embodiments of mothers without their children. In her 1997 book, entitled Mother Without Child: Contemporary Fiction and the Crisis of Motherhood, the critic Elaine Tuttle Hansen urged for critical and feminist engagement with what she described as 'the borders of motherhood and the women who really live there, neither fully inside nor fully outside some recognizable "family unit", and often exiles from their children'. This book extends and expands this important enquiry, looking at maternal experience and mothering on the borders of motherhood in different historical and cultural contexts, thereby opening up the way in which we imagine and represent mothers without their children to reassessment and revision, and encouraging further dialogue about what it might mean to mother on the borders of motherhood."--

Whilst the ideological construction of families has undergone significant change from pre-modernity to modernity, children remain an essential feature. This paper considers the relationship between families, feminist theory and voluntarily childless women. It is primarily concerned to explore women's experiences as non-sexually reproductive within a cultural context that continues to emphasise femininity based on sexual reproduction, and families defined by the presence of children. In recent decades, remaining childless has emerged as a trend amongst Western women, understood within the broader context of changes in women's political, economic and social status. The paper aims to argue that whilst second-wave feminism has championed these changes in women's status, it nevertheless sustains a cultural definition of woman' based on sexual reproduction. As such, feminist theory continues to regard childless women as dysfunctional. The paper concludes by exploring the effectiveness of recent challenges from postmodern feminism to subvert women's association with sexual reproduction, and extend the notion of families to include individuals without children.

AbstractFamilies that do not include children are largely overlooked by family scholars and in popular discourse. Yet this is one of several family forms that has grown in developed nations since the 1970s. As increasingly fewer adults choose to become parents, understanding the families they create, and the consequences of these family forms, will become even more important. Studies of childless adults reveal that they create bonds to fulfill many of the same functions that families with children fulfill. Research on how, and the extent to which, the childless "do" family without kids is reviewed and suggestions for future research are made.

1. Families as Facilitators of Children's Intellectual Development at 3 Years of Age: A Causal Analysis -- 2. The Relationship between Parental Distancing Strategies and the Child's Cognitive Behavior -- 3. Family Environments and the Acquisition of Reading Skills: Toward a More Precise Analysis -- 4. Some American Families at Dinner -- 5. Play as a Context for Early Learning: Lab and Home Analyses -- 6. On the Familial Origins of Personality and Social Style -- 7. Variation in Infant Experience Associated with Alternative Family Roles -- 8. Family Day Care: The Role of the Surrogate Mother -- 9. The Relationship between Parents' Beliefs about Development and Family Constellation, Socioeconomic Status, and Parents' Teaching Strategies -- 10. The Role of Categorization in the Socialization Process: How Parents and Older Siblings Cognitively Organize Child Behavior -- 11. Learning to Do Things without Help -- Author Index.