Books in the Palgrave Macmillan Studies in Family and Intimate Life series

This book maps father failure and redemption through three decades of Hollywood family films, revealing how libertarian notions that align agency with autonomy lead to new conflicts for the contemporary father.

Through a range of materials, methodologies and national perspectives, chapters make up three sections to cover single mothers, single fathers and solo mothers (single women who became parents through assisted reproductive technologies).

This book examines the tensions and ambivalences which men encounter as they negotiate contemporary expectations of fatherhood and fulfill their own expectations of what it means to be a 'good' father.

This book investigates the extent of gender inequality in the division of labour in the modern household. Through comparisons of the time allocations of single couple families without children, couple families with children and lone parents, a comprehensive account of the evolution of gender inequality over a typical lifecourse is presented.

When parents form families by reaching across social barriers to adopt children, where and how does race enter the adoption process? How do agencies, parents, and the adopted children themselves deal with issues of difference in adoption? This volume engages writers from both sides of the Atlantic to take a close look at these issues.

This book explores the many varied ways in which family and intimate lives are realized through mobility: from leaving home, courtship, relationship breakdown, moving house, commuting, family holidays through to children's mobilities, documenting how mobility creates, sustains and dissolves family and intimate relations.

Exploring how people negotiate and reconcile, construct and re-construct their distinctive gender and ethnic identities in a cross-cultural context, Hu examines what happens when two distinct cultures meet at the intimate interface of marriage and family.

Exploring how feelings about gender have changed over three interrelated generations of women and men during the 20th century, this book explores how experiences are connected, what is continued, what triggers changes. It looks at how new feelings of gender gradually change gender norms from within, and how they contribute to new social practices.

Centrally the authors emphasise the re-traditionalisation involved in de-traditionalisation and the connectedness involved in individualised processes of relationship change. Reinventing Couples will be of interest to students and scholars across a range of disciplines including sociology, social work and social policy.

This book challenges assumptions about the motivations that drive women from relatively poor, developing countries to use intermarriage dating sites to find partners from relatively wealthy, developed countries.

Despite growing concern about intergenerational tension and even possible conflict, the book finds evidence of a significant degree of intergenerational solidarity both within families at the micro level and between generations more generally within society at the macro level in Britain.

This book looks at the simultaneous processes of making and un-making of families that are part of the adoption practice. Global Families, Inequality and Transnational Adoption will be of interest to students and scholars of adoption studies, family and kinship, sociology, anthropology, social work and development.

This book is about how Chinese men make sense of and practise fatherhood within the context of changing gender conventions and socio-cultural conditions.

Who and how we love may be changing but our desire to be in a relationship endures. This book presents an incisive account of how couples experience, understand and sustain long-term relationships, exploring the emotional, practical and biographical resources that couples draw on, across the life course.

Everyday foodways are a powerful means of drawing boundaries between social groups and defining who we are and where we belong. This book draws upon auto/biographical food narratives and emphasises the power of everyday foodways in maintaining and reinforcing social divisions along the lines of gender and class.

Based on repeat interviews from a range of generational perspectives, this book explores the nature of contemporary British Chinese households and childhoods, examining the extent to which parents identify themselves as being Chinese and how decisions to uphold or move away from 'traditional' Chinese values impacts on their child-rearing methods.

There has been a widespread fascination with age-dissimilar couples in recent years. This book examines how the romantic relationships of these couples are understood. Based on qualitative research, McKenzie investigates notions of autonomy, relatedness, contradiction, and change in age-dissimilar relationships and romantic love.

This book conceptualises the lived experience of intimacy in a world in which the terms and conditions of love and friendship are increasingly unclear. It shows that the analysis of the 'small world' of dyads can give important clues about society and its gendered makeup.

With reproductive medical technologies becoming more accessible, assisted donor conception is raising new and important questions about family life. Using in-depth interviews the authors explore the lived reality of donor conception and offer insights into the complexities of these new family relationships.

Drawing on interviews with UK couples in distance relationships, this book seeks to explain, evaluate and advance sociological debates about intimate life. It provides a rich and human perspective on how bodies, emotions and connections to others are key in maintaining intimate relationships.

Recent theorizing tends to position ordinary relationships as something we have lost, yet the nature of these relationships is not seriously engaged with. Drawing on rich empirical data, this book questions epochal claims about contemporary emotional lives, setting out to be explicit about the nature of ordinary relationships.

In this book, Dimitra Hartas explores parenting and its influence on children's learning and wellbeing while examining the impact of social class amidst policy initiatives to eradicate child poverty in 21st Century Britain.

Drawing on research from the Timescapes Study, this volume discusses the life chances and experiences of children and young people, parents and older generations. A unique qualitative longitudinal study forms the basis for the chapter contributions, delivering policy-relevant findings to address individual and family lives over time.