Family Values


Book Description

Why was the discourse of family values so pivotal to the conservative and free-market revolution of the 1980s and why has it continued to exert such a profound influence on American political life? Why have free-market neoliberals so often made common cause with social conservatives on the question of family, despite their differences on all other issues? In this book, Melinda Cooper challenges the idea that neoliberalism privileges atomized individualism over familial solidarities, and contractual freedom over inherited status. Delving into the history of the American poor laws, she shows how the liberal ethos of personal responsibility was always undergirded by a wider imperative of family responsibility and how this investment in kinship obligations recurrently facilitated the working relationship between free-market liberals and social conservatives. Neoliberalism, she argues, must be understood as an effort to revive and extend the poor law tradition in the contemporary idiom of household debt. As neoliberal policymakers imposed cuts to health, education, and welfare budgets, they simultaneously identified the family as a wholesale alternative to the twentieth-century welfare state. And as the responsibility for deficit spending shifted from the state to the household, the private debt obligations of family were defined as foundational to socio-economic order. Despite their differences, neoliberals and social conservatives were in agreement that the bonds of family needed to be encouraged — and at the limit enforced — as a necessary counterpart to market freedom. In a series of case studies ranging from Clinton’s welfare reform to the AIDS epidemic, and from same-sex marriage to the student loan crisis, Cooper explores the key policy contributions made by neoliberal economists and legal theorists. Only by restoring the question of family to its central place in the neoliberal project, she argues, can we make sense of the defining political alliance of our times, that between free-market economics and social conservatism.




Families' Values


Book Description

Parents attempt to impart particular political values to their children, but the political worlds of families contain many more varied relationships and mechanisms. This book pulls back the curtain on those less-studied patterns to consider the multi-faceted ways in which various family dynamics systematically affect a person's political beliefs.




Families and Family Values in Society and Culture


Book Description

This book which has been created in the framework of the EU-funded COST Action INTERFASOL brings together researchers from 22 INTERFASOL countries, who frame intergenerational family solidarity in the specific historical, cultural, social and economic context of their own country. Integrating different perspectives from social and political sciences, economics, communication, health and psychology, the book offers country-specific knowledge and new insights into family relations, family values and family policies across Europe. Praise for Families and Family Values in Society and Culture: "This comprehensive study of families in Europe reveals the strength and variation in family solidarity and values. By drawing together detailed descriptions of continuity and change, Families and Family Values in Society and Culture provides a fascinating account of the social and cultural contexts that shape European family life. The case studies of families in different European countries compare demographic and welfare regimes to consider the challenges facing generations in Europe and responses to these. The book is an invaluable resource for researchers studying family life and inter-generational solidarity." Clare Holdsworth Professor of Social Geography Keele University "This book is based on the testimony of experts, each of them proposing analyses which are specific to their own society. It provides an opportunity for the reader to take a new look at the evolution of intergenerational solidarity in 22 countries, whose wealth, welfare systems, and demographic situations, as well as recent events (wars, migratory movements, …) offer specific challenges. It adopts the perspective of the insider to shed light not only on culture and values in each country, but also on conflicts between tradition and modernity, and between subcultures in the same society. The book thus allows better understanding of changes in intergenerational and gender relations, and the variety of solutions implemented or suggested to promote more satisfactory expressions of intergenerational solidarity for the next decade. Families and Family Values in Society and Culture provides an invaluable contribution for cross-cultural and social sciences researchers interested in understanding how different forms of solidarity arise from family and social dynamics." Anne Marie Fontaine Professor of Psychology University of Porto




Family Values


Book Description

The family is hotly contested ideological terrain. Some defend the traditional two-parent heterosexual family while others welcome its demise. Opinions vary about how much control parents should have over their children's upbringing. Family Values provides a major new theoretical account of the morality and politics of the family, telling us why the family is valuable, who has the right to parent, and what rights parents should—and should not—have over their children. Harry Brighouse and Adam Swift argue that parent-child relationships produce the "familial relationship goods" that people need to flourish. Children's healthy development depends on intimate relationships with authoritative adults, while the distinctive joys and challenges of parenting are part of a fulfilling life for adults. Yet the relationships that make these goods possible have little to do with biology, and do not require the extensive rights that parents currently enjoy. Challenging some of our most commonly held beliefs about the family, Brighouse and Swift explain why a child's interest in autonomy severely limits parents' right to shape their children's values, and why parents have no fundamental right to confer wealth or advantage on their children. Family Values reaffirms the vital importance of the family as a social institution while challenging its role in the reproduction of social inequality and carefully balancing the interests of parents and children.




Little Family, Big Values


Book Description

The stars of the reality television show "Little People, Big World" share personal experiences and offer advice for building strong family values based on love, respect, and mutual support.




Philanthropy, Heirs & Values


Book Description

Review: ...right on target! This book proves that philanthropy is an incredible teaching tool for your family once you know how to apply its power.




Aging Families and Use of Proverbs for Values Enrichment


Book Description

Those providing services to older persons must develop intervention strategies that are relevant to their clients’life experiences. Aging Families and Use of Proverbs for Values Enrichment presents administrators, practitioners, educators, researchers, and students with intervention models that acknowledge and build upon the proverbs orientation of the older client. This insightful book offers information from contributing authors who have professional and personal experience with the use of proverbs. Proverbs, pithy sayings that underline basic life truths, are shown in this book to work as transmitters of values and as assessment tools. To improve the ability of service programs addressing the needs of older persons, Aging Families and Use of Proverbs for Values Enrichment delineates existing approaches that are low-cost or no cost to the service provider and beneficial to older persons. Moreover, these practices are considered within the context of a conceptual model of proverbs intervention programs for older persons that takes into consideration principles of care, cultural diversity, and family traditions. Contributors examine human competencies, coping mechanisms, and limitations, as well as other more general topics: Rehabilitation: Dispels the myth that older persons can not break long-term habits and learn new things that will improve their lives. Intergenerational Transmission: Discusses family-oriented and cultural values that are passed down from generation to generation via oral tradition. Coping with Life Events: Addresses proverbs as coping mechanisms for surviving the social transitions of life. Health and Health Care: Dispels the myth that some health care practices are taboo among older persons. Cultural and Family Ties: Discusses proverbs as the cornerstone of family sharing regarding life’s lessons. Spirituality: Contrasts African American religiosity with spirituality. Discusses proverbs as messages of faith and hope. Any person who provides services to older persons--social workers, counselors, physicians, nurses, ministers and other members of the clergy, speech and physical therapists, rehabilitation counselors, and family therapists--can benefit from using proverbs, as shown in this book, in their care approach.




Marriage and Modernity


Book Description

An innovative cultural history of the evolution of modern marriage practices in Bengal, Marriage and Modernity challenges the assumption that arranged marriage is an antiquated practice. Rochona Majumdar demonstrates that in the late colonial period Bengali marriage practices underwent changes that led to a valorization of the larger, intergenerational family as a revered, “ancient” social institution, with arranged marriage as the apotheosis of an “Indian” tradition. She meticulously documents the ways that these newly embraced “traditions”—the extended family and arranged marriage—entered into competition and conversation with other emerging forms of kinship such as the modern unit of the couple, with both models participating promiscuously in the new “marketplace” for marriages, where matrimonial advertisements in the print media and the payment of dowry played central roles. Majumdar argues that together the kinship structures newly asserted as distinctively Indian and the emergence of the marriage market constituted what was and still is modern about marriages in India. Majumdar examines three broad developments related to the modernity of arranged marriage: the growth of a marriage market, concomitant debates about consumption and vulgarity in the conduct of weddings, and the legal regulation of family property and marriages. Drawing on matrimonial advertisements, wedding invitations, poems, photographs, legal debates, and a vast periodical literature, she shows that the modernization of families does not necessarily imply a transition from extended kinship to nuclear family structures, or from matrimonial agreements negotiated between families to marriage contracts between individuals. Colonial Bengal tells a very different story.




Families, Values, and the Transfer of Knowledge in Northern Societies, 1500–2000


Book Description

This edited collection sheds light on Nordic families’ strategies and methods for transferring significant cultural heritage to the next generation over centuries. Contributors explore why certain values, attitudes, knowledge, and patterns were selected while others were left behind, and show how these decisions served and secured families’ well-being and values. Covering a time span ranging from the early modern era to the end of the twentieth century, the book combines the innovative "history from below" approach with a broad variety of families and new kinds of source material to open up new perspectives on the history of education and upbringing.




Our Families, Our Values


Book Description

As Our Families, Our Values turns upside-down the widely accepted notion that only heterosexual people are entitled to get married, have sex, and rear children, you gain insight into personal struggles and affirmations that testify to the spirituality, procreativity, and wholesomeness of the diverse relationships of the Lavender community. You will also learn about various ongoing efforts to give religious pride to the various configurations of gay relationships, families, and values and the disruption of popular interpretations of the Scriptures that have been used to justify the oppression of sexual minorities. This book will both inform you and delight you as it reminds you that same-sex unions bring much cause for celebration and that religion and homosexuality are not mutually exclusive.