Family Sociology

Parenting teenagers is one of the biggest challenges parents face. New realities make becoming independent more difficult. Teens are traveling a different road and are moving at a different pace than those of previous generations. Today's cultural environment is more complicated and confusing than ever. But fear not! Family expert Jim Burns provides a handy guide for parenting teens.

Home Fires is the powerful saga of the Gordon family--real people, names unchanged. Spanning nearly five decades, from the end of World War II to the early 1990s, their story has the scope, depth, wealth of incident, and emotional intensity of a great novel, and an abundance of humor, scandal, warmth, and trauma--the recognizable components of family life. This is also a masterful chronicle of the turbulent postwar era, illuminating the interplay between private life and profound cultural changes.

In Polygamy: A Very Short Introduction, Sarah M.S. Pearsall explores what plural marriages reveal about the inner workings of marriage and describes the controversies surrounding it. The book emphasizes the diversity of historical polygamist societies, from the Shi'ite Muslims and Wendat men who practiced short-term marriages to the Mixteca, Maori, Inca, Algonquin, and Marta indigenous people of North America and the Pacific Islands. Pearsall also explains the divides within Christianity that led to Joseph Smith's establishment of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Diskriminierung im Zeitalter von #MeToo, Catcalling, Manspreading, Sexismus - nur wenige Themen finden gegenwärtig ein solches Maß an Aufmerksamkeit wie diese, wohl auch deswegen, weil vieles im Umbruch ist. Speziell die westlichen Gesellschaften, aber auch ein großer Teil der nicht-westlichen Weltbevölkerung, befindet sich in einer Art Suchbewegung, stellt Althergebrachtes in Frage, ohne genau zu wissen, was an seine Stelle treten soll. Konfrontationen und Verunsicherungen sind die Folge. Dieses Hörbuch diskutiert ethische und philosophische Aspekte der Geschlechterbeziehungen.

In Work Mate Marry Love, Harvard Business School professor and former Barnard College president Debora L. Spar offers an incisive and provocative account of how technology has transformed our intimate lives in the past, and how it will do so again in the future. Surveying the course of history, she shows how marriage as we understand it resulted from the rise of agriculture, and that the nuclear family emerged with the industrial revolution. In their day, the street light, the car, and later the pill all upended courtship and sex.

Eine gute Bildung ist entscheidend für die Zukunft unserer Kinder und Jugendlichen. Aber was genau ist gute Bildung, vor allem in einer Zeit der globalen Umbrüche, in der die Definition von Arbeit sich massiv wandelt? Was brauchen unsere Jüngsten von uns, damit sie sich Wissen und Können aneignen und gleichzeitig Orientierung im Leben finden? Wie lernen sie, wie Leben und Zusammenleben im 21. Jahrhundert wirklich gelingt? Unsere Bildungseinrichtungen kriegen das nicht allein hin, verhindern es oft sogar.

Sociologist Margaret A. Hagerman zeroes in on affluent white kids to observe how they make sense of privilege, unequal educational opportunities, and police violence. In fascinating detail, Hagerman considers the role that they and their families play in the reproduction of racism and racial inequality in America. White Kids, based on two years of research involving in-depth interviews with white kids and their families, is a clear-eyed and sometimes shocking account of how white kids learn about race.

Little Jeff Pearce grew up in a postwar Liverpool slum. His father lived the life of an affluent gentleman whilst his mother was forced to steal bread to feed her starving children. Life was tough, and from the moment Jeff could walk he learned to go door to door, begging rags from the rich, which he sold down the markets. Leaving school at the age of 14, he embarked on an extraordinary journey and found himself, before the age of 30, a millionaire. Then, after a cruel twist of fate left him penniless, he, his wife and his children were forced out of their beautiful home.

Twins Talk is an ethnographic study of identical twins in the United States, a study unique in that it considers what twins have to say about themselves, instead of what researchers have written about them. It presents, in the first person, the grounded and practical experiences of twins as they engage, both individually and together, the "who am I" and "who are we" questions of life. Here, the twins themselves are the stars.

In 21st-century India, tradition is colliding with Western culture, a clash that touches the lives of everyday Indians from the wealthiest to the poorest. While ethnicity, class, and religion are influencing the nation's development, so too are pop culture and technology - an uneasy fusion whose impact is most evident in the institution of marriage. The Heart Is a Shifting Sea introduces three couples whose relationships illuminate these sweeping cultural shifts in dramatic ways.

Ben Mattlin's wife, ML, recalls falling in love with his confidence and sheer determination. On one of their earliest dates, he persuaded her to ride on his lap in his wheelchair on their way home from an Elvis Costello concert. Thirty years later, they still travel like this from time to time, undaunted by the curious stares following them down the street. But In Sickness and in Health is more than an "inspiring" story of how a man born with spinal muscular atrophy

For more than a century before gay marriage became a hot-button political issue, same-sex unions flourished in America. Pairs of men and pairs of women joined together in committed unions, standing by each other "for richer and for poorer, in sickness and in health" for periods of 30 or 40 - sometimes as many as 50 - years. In short, they loved and supported each other every bit as much as any husband and wife. In Outlaw Marriages, cultural historian Rodger Streitmatter reveals how some of these unions didn’t merely improve the quality of life for the two people involved but also enriched the American culture.

Acclaimed essayist Mark Edmundson reflects on his own rite of passage as a high school football player to get to larger truths about the ways America's Game shapes its men. Football teaches young men self-discipline and teamwork. But football celebrates violence. Football is a showcase for athletic beauty and physical excellence. But football damages young bodies and minds, sometimes permanently. Football inspires confidence and direction. But football instills cockiness, a false sense of superiority.

More than a decade after the New York Times best-selling anthology The Bitch in the House spoke up loud and clear for a generation of young women, nine of the original contributors are back - along with 16 captivating new voices - sharing their ruminations from an older, stronger, and wiser perspective about love, sex, work, family, independence, body image, health, and aging: the critical flash points of women's lives today.

Crazy Little Thing is a look at why we want to be in love and the burbling, boiling soup of endorphins, hormones, and neurotransmitters that spill from our brain to make us do things that would otherwise be viewed as insane. Investigative journalist Liz Langley traveled the country to research and interview singularly love-mad folks who maimed, murdered, and married.

At age 28, Mira Ptacin discovered she was pregnant. Though it was unplanned, she soon embraced the pregnancy and became engaged to Andrew, the father. But five months later, an ultrasound revealed birth defects that would give the child no chance of survival outside the womb. Mira was given three options: terminate her pregnancy, induce early delivery, or wait and inevitably miscarry. Her story is woven together with the story of Mira's mother, who immigrated from Poland (also at the age of 28) and adopted a son, Julian.

Entre padre e hijos ha permitido que millones de padres alrededor del mundo fortalezcan las relaciones con sus hijos. Escrito por el célebre psicólogo Dr. Haim Ginott, este libro revolucionario brinda consejos y enseñanzas para educar a los hijos de forma cariñosa y disciplinada a la vez.

With insight and compassion, Pamela Stone shows convincingly that, far from representing a return to tradition, the decision of some women to relinquish high-powered careers is a reluctant and conflict-ridden response to the growing mismatch between privatized families and time-demanding jobs.

After her traditional engagement to her high school sweetheart falls apart, Liza Monroy faced the prospect of another devastating loss: the deportation of her best friend Emir. Desperate to stay in America, Emir tried every legal recourse to obtain a green card knowing that his return to the Middle East where gay men are often beaten and sometimes killed was too dangerous. So Liza proposes to Emir in efforts to keep him safe and by her side. After a fast wedding in Las Vegas, the couple faces new adventures and obstacles in both L.A. and New York City as they dodge the INS.

In 2010 former gang leader turned community activist Big Mike Cummings asked UCLA gang expert Jorja Leap to co-lead a group of men struggling to be better fathers in Watts, South Los Angeles. These men, black and brown, from late adolescence to middle age, come together each week to help one another answer the question "how can I be a good father when I've never had one?"