Children, Young People and Families > Child Welfare
You are looking at 1 - 10 of 933 items
Interdisciplinary social sciences literature on the value and significance of engaged fatherhood and father-inclusive approaches to practice for enhanced family outcomes have begun to reach a consensus. Yet there has been less attention to how research knowledge about fatherhood, including that which is co-produced with and for fathers, can be more effectively translated and embedded in practice and policy contexts. This article elaborates on a cumulative, empirically driven process that has established new relational ecologies between young fathers, multi-agency professionals and researchers. It illustrates how these ecologies, supported by longitudinal and co-creative research combined, are driving societal transformations through knowledge exchange and the instigation of new father-inclusive practice interventions that address the marginalisation of young fathers. The methodologies, including the co-creation of the Young Dads Collective and its impacts on young fathers and multi-agency professionals, are evaluated, confirming them as powerful and productive mechanisms for embedding father-inclusive practices within existing support and policy systems.
Parental love has been studied in relation to infants and younger children. The adult sons and daughters who marry and become parents constitute another category of ‘children’. As the earlier literature did not explore parental love in relation to these ‘adult married sons and daughters’ earlier, the current study was the first-ever effort in this regard. The study was conducted in two phases and involved 982 purposely selected participants. A new scale to measure love was also developed and validated during the two phases of the study. The findings revealed significant differences in paternal and maternal love between married and unmarried sons and daughters. The findings of the study would serve as a novel contribution to the existing literature on parental love. The newly developed ‘Love Scale’ would facilitate future researchers in exploring love in a general way that could be applied to all possible relationships.
Civil partnerships were extended to mixed-sex couples in England and Wales at the end of 2019, shortly followed by Northern Ireland (2020) and Scotland (2021). Since then, thousands of mixed-sex couples have entered a civil partnership. While civil partnerships were favoured by politicians as an alternative to legal rights for cohabitants, we know little about why mixed-sex couples would choose a civil partnership. In 2020–21 we interviewed individuals and couples who had entered or were planning a mixed-sex civil partnership (MSCP) to explore this further. We find that MSCPs are constructed in opposition to the ‘traditional’ image of marriage/weddings and yet symbolic elements including dress, form and structure are necessarily relied on in constructing something new, via a process of bricolage. Moreover, through civil partnership motivation talk, mixed-sex couples are constructing an individual morality that is centred on resisting cultural norms, advocating equality and justice, and pragmatic love.
Couple relationships and money practices are intimately connected. Money can often cause disagreement and conflict within couples and represents symbolic values and expectations between partners. This study adopts a practices approach to exploring money practices among Swedish couples in the third age (60–80 years old) through 17 semi-structured interviews. We focus particularly on how money practices constitute and are constituted by dimensions of ‘being and doing couple’. We find that money practices both reflect and constitute couplehood. Our analysis has revealed that money practices are interlinked with couplehood through the primary themes of togetherness, fairness and trust, independence and finally, a reluctance to imagine oneself outside of couplehood, for other reasons than widowhood.
Domestic violence impedes women’s exercise of full participatory citizenship. This article explicates the role of family, community and social networks in the aftermath of an abusive relationship as both an indicator of intimate citizenship as an achieved status and as a facilitator of the process of citizenisation in the private and public spheres. Based on life history interviews with 26 South Asian women in the UK, the findings reveal the myriad ways in which denial of citizenship continues long after, and in part due to, the end of the abusive relationship, and outline women’s efforts to regain a sense of identity, belongingness and membership within their intimate, family and community lives. In doing so, this article advances conceptual understandings of the lived practice of citizenship. It also problematises the binary construction of ‘victims’ versus ‘survivors’, which is premised on a linear and successful journey towards citizenisation following the end of the abusive relationship.
The number of people living alone is increasing in Finland (; ), in Europe () and globally. Individualisation is growing, and many public institutions are adjusting to the rising number of single clientele. At the same time, the couple norm persists, and monogamous partnering is still often seen as the most appropriate way to organise intimate adult life. In this study, we analysed the written stories of 19 single men aged 29–64 and found that the couple norm was predominant in their stories. Internalisation of the norm caused feelings of inadequacy, a lack of self-appreciation and uncertainty about the future. Many men attributed their singlehood to events in their past and felt a lack of agency at present.
With the emphasis on children’s responsibility for the care of ageing parents, this study examined how Chinese adult children’s support provided to parents was associated with filial piety, support from parents and parent-child contact frequency. With the 2006 Chinese General Social Survey, we used structural equation modelling with 1,452 adults with two living parents and tested the model for sons and daughters separately. For both groups, the results showed that (1) filial piety was positively associated with emotional support provided to parents; (2) support received from parents was positively related to instrumental and emotional support to parents; and (3) parent-child contact frequency was linked to instrumental support. For adult daughters, financial support was positively associated with the support received from parents and negatively related to parent-child contact frequency. This study suggests that the traditional norm of filial piety may be less influential than other factors for adult children’s support behaviour.
Households are sites where a progressive politics of change towards sustainability can be nourished. Efforts to do so, however, must attend to gender dynamics. Our aim is to improve our understanding of how gender and sustainability intersect at the household level and engage with progressive politics in this context. To do so, we present a collaborative autoethnography focused on gender and sustainability in our household covering five years during which we experienced multiple lifecourse transitions. Building on this we answer two questions. First, how does the encounter between personal experiences and scholarship shape conceptual refinement? Second, how do personal experiences and scholarship combine to shape what we understand as progressive politics? This article not only advances the understanding of gender and sustainability in households and progressive politics in this context but also shows that collaborative autoethnography offers a valuable methodological toolkit for advancing research towards progressive politics.
This article presents analyses from an international empirical study of young fatherhood in Sweden and the UK to interrogate how welfare contexts and family policies shape young fathers’ views of parenthood. Our analyses demonstrate that despite differences in constructions of young fatherhood, whereby young parenthood is problematised in UK family policy, more so than in Sweden, young fathers in both countries express an encouraging commitment to contemporary cultural imperatives for engaged fatherhood. However, differences in welfare and parental leave systems have a clear influence on the extent to which the young men in the respective countries fulfil their parental commitments and act as local agents of change in the wider social project of gender equality. We argue that while policy processes and discourses in support of young parenthood and gender equality are currently treated as disparate concerns, their articulations with one another may instead be seen as complementary and symbiotic.
COVID-19-related restrictions had an enormous impact on weddings in 2020. For three months, weddings were effectively prohibited, and requirements for social distancing, hand-sanitising and face coverings existed throughout England and Wales for the rest of the year. In August 2020, we conducted a survey of couples who were planning to marry between March and December 2020. This article focuses on how many respondents had postponed their wedding, and what they said about their reasons for doing so. We analyse their responses according to the significance attached to three alternative meanings of a wedding: an event for family and friends, a traditional ceremony that has to be conducted in a particular way, and the individualistic ‘perfect day’. We found that many couples attach considerable importance to who attends their weddings and that some traditions are very important to them, but few responses supported the notion that weddings are principally extravagant displays.
