Available open access digitally under CC-BY-NC-ND licence. Based on in-depth fieldwork with Belgian children aged 10 to 16, this book examines how children in shared physical custody define and negotiate their place within the household of each parent. The authors analyse how family practices within and between each dwelling shape children’s sense home, and the strategies and skills children develop to manage and position themselves in these different environments. Challenging common stereotypes and giving voice to children in shared custody, the book provides valuable insights for practitioners and scholars to better understand and support children and their parents.

Stepmothers often battle with a range of negative myths and stereotypes, with Cinderella’s wicked stepmother being the most infamous. Drawing on 20 in-depth interviews with British stepmothers, this book reimagines the expectations, practices and position of stepmothers through a feminist sociological lens. Combining firsthand accounts, including the author’s own experiences, the book reveals the complexities of stepfamily dynamics and how stepmothers navigate them. By examining the interplay between personal experiences and broader gendered, historical and social structures, the author offers a fresh perspective on contemporary stepmothers and stepfamilies.

Focusing on Ghana, the first country in sub-Saharan Africa to gain independence from European colonial rule and the first in the world to ratify the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, this book explores how dominant children's rights principles interact with the lived realities of a range of children’s lives. The author considers the changeability and inconsistencies of childhoods within this context and the factors that underpin these varied intersections, including cultural norms, British colonial legacy, the influence of Christianity, urbanization, and social, economic and political transformations. Challenging one-dimensional portrayals of childhoods in the Global South, the author highlights the need for more holistic approaches to the study of children’s lives and children’s rights realization in Southern contexts.

This book offers an innovative perspective on Muslim family life in British society. Drawing on recent debates, the book considers how theories of family have overlooked Muslim families and offers a comprehensive framework to address this oversight. Informed by decolonizing approaches, the book sheds light on the impact of narrow and stigmatizing perspectives that shape our understanding of Muslim families. The author pays close attention to the increasing diversity of family forms and to the role of gender and generation, whilst also considering race, ethnicity and class. In doing so, she demonstrates how a better understanding of Muslim family life can inform policies to address inequalities, and advocates for placing Muslim families at the heart of policy solutions.

Understanding what ‘family’ means – and how best to support families – depends on challenging politicized assumptions that frame ‘ordinary’ families in comparison to an imagined problematic ‘other’. Learning from the perspectives of people who were in care in childhood, this innovative book helps redefine the concept of family. Linking two longitudinal studies involving young adults in England, it reveals important new insights into the diverse and dynamic complexity of family lives, identities and practices in time – through childhood and beyond. Paving the way for future policy and practice, this book makes an important contribution to the theorization of family in the 21st century.

This collection explores leading values and concepts in global child-based research through the lens of reflexivity. The book considers issues such as the identities and roles of researchers, as well as the burdens, boundaries, and ethical frameworks which govern their activities. Using empirical examples from Israel, India, Thailand, and England, expert contributors discuss a range of topics including online safety, disabilities, gang membership, safeguarding, sexting, and child prostitution. This book guides childhood research towards a more reflexive debate that critically challenges conventions, and highlights plurality of voice.

Children’s leisure lives are changing, with increasing dominance of organised activities and screen-based leisure. These shifts have reconfigured parenting practices, too. However, our current understandings of these processes are race-blind and based mostly on the experiences of white middle-class families. Drawing on an innovative study of middle-class British Indian families, this book brings children’s and parents’ voices to the forefront and bridges childhood studies, family studies and leisure studies to theorise children’s leisure from a fresh perspective. Demonstrating the salience of both race and class in shaping leisure cultures within middle-class racialised families, this is an invaluable contribution to key sociological debates around leisure, childhoods and parenting ideologies.

In the absence of public provision, many governments rely on the market to meet childcare demand. But who are the actors shaping this market? What work do they do to marketize care? And what does it mean for how childcare is provided? Based on an innovative theoretical framework and an in-depth study of the New Zealand childcare market, Gallagher examines the problematic growth of private, for-profit childcare. Opening the ‘black box’ of childcare markets to closer scrutiny, this book brings to light the complex political, social and economic dynamics behind childcare provisioning.

Attachment parenting is an increasingly popular style of childrearing that emphasises ‘natural’ activities such as extended breastfeeding, bedsharing and babywearing. Such parenting activities are framed as the key to addressing a variety of social ills. Parents’ choices are thus made deeply significant with the potential to guarantee the well-being of future societies. Examining black mothers’ engagements with attachment parenting, Hamilton shows the limitations of this neoliberal approach. Unique in its intersectional analysis of contemporary mothering ideologies, this outstanding book fills a gap in the literature on parenting culture studies, drawing on black feminist theorizing to analyse intensive mothering practices and policies. Black Mothers and Attachment Parenting is shortlisted for the 2021 BSA Philip Abrams Memorial Prize.

Drawing on detailed qualitative research, this timely study explores the experiences of fathers who take on equal or primary care responsibilities for young children. The authors examine what prompts these arrangements, how fathers adjust to their caregiving roles over time, and what challenges they face along the way. The book asks what would encourage more fathers to become primary or equal caregivers, and how we can make things easier for those who do. Offering new academic insight and practical recommendations, this will be key reading for those interested in parenting, families and gender, including researchers, policymakers, practitioners and students.

We routinely judge how well children are doing in their lives by how they spend their time, yet we know remarkably little about it. This rigorous review of four decades of data provides the clearest insights yet into the way children use their time. With analysis of changes in the time spent on family, education, culture and technology, as well as children’s own views on their habits, it provides a fascinating perspective on behaviour, wellbeing, social change and more. This is an indispensable companion to the work of policy makers, academics and researchers, and anyone interested in the daily lives of children.

Nordic countries lead the way in facilitating better work-family integration through their design of parental leave policies that encourage men towards life courses with greater care responsibilities. Based on original research, this compelling book offers a novel analysis of the everyday parental practices of fathers and parents in Norway as a way of understanding the workings of labour market and welfare policies, whilst considering how migrant fathers might relate to the expectations such laws generate. The authors showcase how this style of men’s care work constitutes a re-gendering of men by promoting ‘caring masculinities’.

From the vantage point of forty years in social research and the study of families, Julia Brannen offers an invaluable account of how research is conducted and ‘matters’ at particular times. This fascinating work covers key developments in the field that remain of vital concern to society and demonstrates how social research is an art as well as a science – a process that involves craft and creativity.

Available Open Access under CC-BY-NC licence Paying privately for childcare is a growing phenomenon worldwide, a trend mirrored in Sweden despite the prevalence there of publicly funded daycare. This book combines theories of family practices, care and childhood studies with the personal perspectives of nannies, au pairs, parents and children to provide new understandings of what constitutes care in nanny families. The authors investigate the ways in which all the participants experience the caring situation, and expose the possibilities and problems of nanny and au pair care. Their study illuminates the ways in which paid domestic care workers 'do' family and care; in doing so, it contributes to wider political and scientific discussions of inequalities at the global and local level, reproduced in and between families, in the context of rapidly changing welfare states.