The evidence of worsening life conditions, concentration of poverty, and high degree of African American segregation in urban areas has led to a growing interest in how neighborhood contexts effect child development and parenting behavior. This study attempts to understand development in context by focusing on the role of neighborhood influences early in child development and to shed light on the pathways by which family and community resources influence development.

This book compiles a series of empirical and conceptual chapters based on Bronfenbrenner’s ecological theory as the framework for understanding the overlapping and intersecting contexts that influence different populations of migrants in the United States and Canada. According to Bronfenbrenner’s model, individuals engage in activities and relationships that directly impact them, including families, schools, and jobs (microsystems), the interrelations among microsystems like family-school (mesosystems), contexts that have an impact on the individual through indirect influences (exosystems), and the overarching cultural milieus in which members share values, beliefs, and lifestyles (macrosystems). Within this edited volume, family, school, work, media, policies, culture, and sociohistorical contexts are examined to understand their influence on immigrant groups. This edited volume also considers immigrants across development and ethnic groups to provide a comprehensive resource on the issues that currently affect immigrant groups.

This title includes a number of Open Access chapters.Bringing together the results of studies of child services from diverse countries and cultures, this book covers a broad array of topical issues and social work interventions. It examines adolescent emotional health, children of substance abusers, childhood depression and teenage suicide, childre

This highly anticipated third edition of the Handbook of Parenting brings together an array of field-leading experts who have worked in different ways toward understanding the many diverse aspects of parenting. Contributors to the Handbook look to the most recent research and thinking to shed light on topics every parent, professional, and policymaker wonders about. Parenting is a perennially "hot" topic. After all, everyone who has ever lived has been parented, and the vast majority of people become parents themselves. No wonder bookstores house shelves of "how-to" parenting books, and magazine racks in pharmacies and airports overflow with periodicals that feature parenting advice. However, almost none of these is evidence-based. The Handbook of Parenting is. Period. Each chapter has been written to be read and absorbed in a single sitting, and includes historical considerations of the topic, a discussion of central issues and theory, a review of classical and modern research, and forecasts of future directions of theory and research. Together, the five volumes in the Handbook cover Children and Parenting, the Biology and Ecology of Parenting, Being and Becoming a Parent, Social Conditions and Applied Parenting, and the Practice of Parenting. Volume 4, Social Conditions and Applied Parenting, describes socially defined groups of parents and social conditions that promote variation in parenting. The chapters in Part I, on Social and Cultural Conditions of Parenting, start with a relational developmental systems perspective on parenting and move to considerations of ethnic and minority parenting among Latino and Latin Americans, African Americans, Asians and Asian Americans, Indigenous parents, and immigrant parents. The section concludes with considerations of disabilities, employment, and poverty on parenting. Parents are ordinarily the most consistent and caring people in children’s lives. However, parenting does not always go right or well. Information, education, and support programs can remedy potential ills. The chapters in Part II, on Applied Issues in Parenting, begin with how parenting is measured and follow with examinations of maternal deprivation, attachment, and acceptance/rejection in parenting. Serious challenges to parenting—some common, such as stress and depression, and some less common, such as substance abuse, psychopathology, maltreatment, and incarceration—are addressed as are parenting interventions intended to redress these trials.

Adult Supervision Required considers the contradictory ways in which contemporary American culture has imagined individual autonomy for parents and children. In many ways, today’s parents and children have more freedom than ever before. There is widespread respect for children’s autonomy as distinct individuals, and a broad range of parenting styles are flourishing. Yet it may also be fair to say that there is an unprecedented fear of children’s and parents’ freedom. Dread about Amber Alerts and “stranger danger” have put an end to the unsupervised outdoor play enjoyed by earlier generations of suburban kids. Similarly, fear of bad parenting has not only given rise to a cottage industry of advice books for anxious parents, but has also granted state agencies greater power to police the family. Using popular parenting advice literature as a springboard for a broader sociological analysis of the American family, Markella B. Rutherford explores how our increasingly psychological conception of the family might be jeopardizing our appreciation for parents’ and children’s public lives and civil liberties.