This volume explores the ethics of making or expanding families through adoption or technologically assisted reproduction. For many people, these methods are separate and distinct: they can choose either adoption or assisted reproduction. But for others, these options blend together. For example, in some jurisdictions, the path of assisted reproduction for same-sex couples is complicated by the need for the partner who is not genetically related to the resulting child to adopt this child if she wants to become the child's legal parent. The essays in this volume critically examine moral choices to pursue adoption, assisted reproduction, or both, and highlight the social norms that can distort decision-making. Among these norms are those that favour people having biologically related children ('bionormativity') or that privilege a traditional understanding of family as a heterosexual unit with one or more children where both parents are the genetic, biological, legal, and social parents of these children. As a whole, the book looks at how adoption and assisted reproduction are morally distinct from one another, but also emphasizes how the two are morally similar. Choosing one, the other, or both of these approaches to family-making can be complex in some respects, but ought to be simple in others, provided that one's main goal is to become a parent.

Making Work and Family Work investigates the difficult choices that contemporary employees must face when juggling work and family with a view to identifying the smart choices that all parties involved—society, employers, employees and families—should make to promote greater work–life balance. Leading scholars Jeffrey Greenhaus and Gary Powell begin by identifying the factors that work against an employee’s ability to be effective and satisfied in their work and family roles. From there, they examine a variety of factors that impact the decision-making process that employees and their families can use to enhance employees’ feelings of work-family balance and families’ well-being. Covering a comprehensive set of topics and perspectives, this fascinating book will appeal to upper-level students of human resource management, organizational behavior, industrial/organizational psychology, sociology, and economics, as well as to thoughtful and engaged professionals.

This book points to a crisis at the heart of modern family law’s treatment of “collaborative family-making”: gamete contributions, surrogate motherhood, adoption, functional parenthood, foster care, and kin caregiving. Born of inequality and anchored by exclusivity and secrecy, the dominant legal framework governing collaborative family-making focuses on the acquisition of collaborative services by legal and intended parents without expecting or fostering any lasting bonds between them. This acquisitional framework is starkly disconnected from empirical accounts of the lived experience of collaborations, which demonstrate complex and ongoing relational attachments that extend beyond a transactional moment. At the intersection of law and sociology, the book is to account for relational realities that fail to conform to neat legal categories of parent and stranger, asking: How should the law reflect the complex interconnections between families and family-making collaborators? Should collaborators be treated as legal strangers? Who is impacted by the lack of legal status possessed by family-making collaborators? Who benefits and who loses? Ultimately, this is a work of optimism that seeks to facilitate family-making collaborations in more ethical ways by insisting that family law recognize and support family-making collaborators. It introduces a bold new legal framework of interconnection and guides the reader in implementing practical legal and contractual changes that promote human dignity, uphold children’s right to identity, and support ongoing relational attachments with adults who are fundamental to children’s lives. The volume provides deep and accessible insight into families and family law for legal practitioners, academics, students, and laypersons interested in family-making collaboration.

This book examines the implications of Confucian moral and ontological understandings for medical decision-making, human embryonic stem cell research, and health care financing. The book reveals East Asian attitudes on the moral status of human embryos and the morality of embryonic stem cell research that are quite different from Christian and Muslim cultural perspectives. The book also discusses how Confucian cultural resources can help meet the challenges of health care financing.

Cynthia Gordon uses tape-recorded conversations about everday, mundane topics among three dual-income families to explore how family communication creates a special kind of meaning and a sense of distinctive group coherence within the family.

There is increasing pressure to involve children and young people in the decisions that affect them. Presenting new research on the extent to which parents and children participate in decision making when childcare social workers are involved, particularly in child protection conferences and Child in Care reviews, Diaz argues for a radical shift in existing practices. Including a range of perspectives, this book highlights the systemic changes needed for social workers and other key professionals to ensure that children and parents participate more meaningfully in decision-making, which will improve the long term outcomes for children and their families.

Once everyone knew what the family was. It was something natural and without a history - mum, dad and the kids. Divorce, women in the workforce, de facto relationships and the sexual liberation movements have fractured the old certainties. Nowadays there is more talk about the family than ever, even if no-one is quite sure what it is anymore. The making and breaking of the Australian family looks at the family in history. It traces the shift from the household economy of the late nineteenth century, to the child-centred nuclear family of the mid-twentieth century, to the recent proliferation of households. The book argues that the so-called traditional family was a quite recent creation, and that its fragmentation is obscured by new redefinitions of the family. The making and breaking of the Australian family addresses the changing experiences of childhood, parenting, home, neighbourhood, work, birth and sexuality. It examines the expansion of the market and the state, patterns of class mobilisation, the reconstruction of masculinity and femininity and the creative strategies of ordinary people in everyday life. This is a lively and accessible book, which will prove a valuable reference for students of history, sociology, women's studies and Australian studies, and will generate wide discussion amongst people concerned with family policy, welfare and contemporary social issues.