Contemporary Family Issues
Contemporary family issues encompass a wide range of challenges and changes affecting families in modern society. These may include issues such as divorce, cohabitation, same-sex marriage, single parenthood, and the impact of technology on family dynamics. Understanding and addressing these issues is important for policymakers, researchers, and individuals seeking to support and strengthen families in today's world.
5 Key excerpts on "Contemporary Family Issues"
eBook - ePubThe Profession of Social Work
Guided by History, Led by Evidence
- Catherine N. Dulmus, Karen M. Sowers(Authors)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- Wiley(Publisher)
...In our case, common assumptions about science and its expression in research underlie or influence all of the issues that we identify. Disagreement about these assumptions and their implications is what makes them issues. Finally, the level of generality in which issues are expressed may obscure their relationship. For example, identifying child welfare and kinship care as separate issues overlooks how the latter issue is a subset of the former one. It follows from our conceptualization that issues are relational and arbitrary. They are relational in requiring some type of agreement about a perceived state of affairs and arbitrary in the sense of being linked to particular viewpoints. What counts as social work issues are negotiated through various means (e.g., journals, texts, and discourses), by various actors (e.g., professional organizations), in different locales and settings. Those topics considered issues function as highlighters—foregrounding matters that some believe need to be addressed. Collectively, the identified issues generate a framework for understanding and influencing social work. As noted, the social work issues discussed in this chapter reflect our assessments of the profession, its aims and practices, and the social contexts within which it functions. Rather than presenting a compendium, the chapter focuses on five interrelated topics that we believe have important continuing implications for the profession: postmodernism/social construction, globalization, evidence-based practice, ethics, and the process of professionalization. In each case, we explain why we see the topic as an issue for social work and articulate some challenges it poses. A brief synopsis of our approach to each issue follows. Postmodernism/Social Construction In this section, we discuss changes in the intellectual landscape over the past 50 years associated with postmodernism...
eBook - ePubFamilies, Labour and Love
Family diversity in a changing world
- Maureen Baker(Author)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Our personal prejudices need to be set aside so that we can more accurately describe and explain family trends. Studying personal life from a sociological or social science perspective means that different ways of behaving and thinking can be identified, systematically compared and analysed within different cultural contexts. Intimate relationships have always been influenced by economic, political, technological and social trends in the larger society, but social scientists have not always accurately described or explained how and why this occurs. This book discusses recent trends in family life and relates them to changes in labour markets, the economy, family-related policies, government discourse and cultural ideas. To make this broad topic more manageable, the book focuses on and compares families living in Australia, New Zealand and Canada. WHY FOCUS ON FAMILIES IN AUSTRALIA, NEW ZEALAND AND CANADA? The three countries are studied together because they initially shared many similarities in culture, social policy, language and laws (excepting the Canadian province of Quebec, which always used the French language and civil law). These three countries were also ‘settler societies’, originally populated by indigenous people but then settled and politically and numerically dominated by immigrants. This means that we can discuss the impact of colonial concepts of family on indigenous people, whose ideas about family structure and relationships differed from those of the colonisers in all three countries. This tripartite comparison also enables us to study the effect of large-scale immigration, industrialisation and globalisation on family life. Historically, governments of these nations have always shared ideas about the relationship between the state and the family and continued to do so with the restructuring of the 1980s and 1990s...
- Barbara H Settles, Suzanne Steinmetz(Authors)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Both the swift growth of life course oriented areas such as childhood and aging and the sweep of gender studies and diversity are challenging the usual measures of quality and importance in the field. At the same time a new wave of traditional thought and practice has dominated the political life and activities of the profession of sociology. Etzioni’s (1993) advocacy of communitarian response to modern alienation and breaks in the social support of individuals and families became the agenda of the American Sociological Association’s annual meeting in 1995 when he was president. Currently many conservative leaders idealize a traditional nuclear family, but protest characterizing this stand as antifeminist. Whether or not these opinion leaders will counter the most recent wave of feminist change and historic research is still unsettled. At this moment in time family sociology cannot stand on the grounds of non-political objective science as its strategy. Family is at the center of politics today. Survival of family sociology is dependent on a pro-active approach. The Way Family is Defined: Censorship and Curriculum Family and Consumer Science, as it is now called, derives from home economics, and was one of the first professional disciplines to grapple with issues of values in understanding families. Historically, the field had a professional concern bordering on an obsession with having a consensus on what was meant by family and a familial centered program for home economics (Brown, 1985). The national association spent considerable energy and money bringing together their leaders to redefine both the concepts of family and of the discipline at several points in the twentieth century. The Lake Placid Conferences (1899-1908), which are usually seen as the founding of the field, left a heritage of concern for the family even as its implementation was sometimes a narrow view of rational homemaking (Brown, 1985)...
eBook - ePubFamily Studies
An Introduction
- Jon Bernardes(Author)
- 2008(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...205) Burr et al. attempted to lay down a definition of the ‘family realm’ to establish ‘family science’. Whilst I do not agree with their particular formulation, I do agree about the centrality of family life. In 1990, Gubrium and Holstein suggested ‘a new direction, a new programme for “family studies”’ (p. 162). The key to their approach is the recognition that ‘the family’ is ‘as much idea as thing’ (p. 163). This approach has been a central part in developing a postmodern approach to Family Studies. This book has a clear mission: stating the case for the establishment of a postmodern Family Studies in the United Kingdom and laying down the essential components of this new discipline. Parties of all kinds have common interests in family life. All agree that people should be given every chance to best prepare themselves for marriage and parenthood. It is in all our interests to support and enhance marriage and parenting. Further generations are vital to us all; the happiness of current generations is also vital to us all. The happiness and well-being of spouses, parents and children must be a prime goal for us all. There are fierce debates about the morality of divorce, abortion, marriage, single parenting, childrearing and many other things. The job of social science is not morality; we have another role to play. It is our job to study the reality of such situations rather than engage in moral debate. It is our task to understand how to minimise the pain, suffering and misery of family life and how to maximise the joy, pleasure and love of family life. Do your elected officials (local and national) believe that families are the most important things of all? Ask them. Family practices and Family Citizenship In that modernist family sociology contributed to a widespread family ideology, it was taking a distinct political stance and contributing to defining a political entity of ‘the family’...
eBook - ePubAn Introduction to Sociology
Feminist Perspectives
- Pamela Abbott, Melissa Tyler, Claire Wallace(Authors)
- 2006(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Stacey therefore celebrates what she argues are signs that the traditional family (the ‘cereal-packet’ norm) is beginning to break down and regards this as a measure of social progress. Whatever position one takes on the family, and the likely implications of recent trends in its formation, change seems certain to continue as the family has always been, as we noted at the outset of this chapter, a dynamic social phenomenon. Macionis and Plummer (2002, pp. 457–458) make five predictions about the future of family life. These are: divorce rates are likely to remain high; family life will be highly variable; men are likely to play a more active role in parenting; economic changes will continue to reform marriage and the family; the importance of new reproductive technologies will increase. SUMMARY 1 Whereas malestream sociologists have emphasised the ways in which the family serves the interests of society as a whole (functionalists) or of capitalism (Marxists), feminists have argued that the family is one of the key sites of oppression for women, whether it is capitalism, men as a class or both that benefit from this. 2 Feminists have looked at various factors associated with women’s position within the family: marriage, violence within the family, the domestic division of labour, women’s relative economic dependency and the gender relations of parenting. 3 Women experience a wide variety of household arrangements and feminists have been concerned to endorse these. However, there is also a strong familial ideology that is reinforced through state legislation, media culture and institutional structures. This ideology represents the patriarchal nuclear family as the natural and normal way to live. 4 There is some evidence, however, that the strength of this familial ideology is beginning to weaken and that an increasingly diverse range of family forms is beginning to emerge in a range of societies. FURTHER READING Silva, E. and Smart, C...
