Vital information on family services, custody, and access rights for gay parents! Queer Families, Common Agendas: Gay People, Lesbians, and Family Values examines the real life experience of those affected by current laws and policies regarding homosexual families. The book will help policy makers, lawyers, social workers, and the general public better understand these families. Here you will be able to compare the progress of policy in the U.S. and Canada for gay and lesbian parents and their children and explore relevant legal approaches in the two countries. In Queer Families, Common Agendas: Gay People, Lesbians, and Family Values, a range of strategies for advancing the rights of sexual minority parents are considered for legal feasibility and political viability. You will gain insight into the contradictions in policies and practices that ultimately disadvantage children based on their family origins, and you will discover alternative approaches for improved services to homosexual families. Queer Families, Common Agendas explores: family law and protection of women-headed households legal definitions of motherhood and fatherhood in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom family and adoption idealogies concerning gay families and their rights to adopt new ways to make social services responsive to minority families the lesbian and gay “agenda” the value of family and the family of values--as opposed to the worn-out phrase “family values” Queer Families, Common Agendas serves as a primer to assist you in understanding the legal struggles that lesbian and gay families are facing today. You will explore concerns about family law, protection of women-headed households, motherhood, fatherhood, adoption and family ideology, and how to make social services responsive to gay and lesbian families. This excellent reference provides you with the necessary background and techniques to create services that are responsive and effective with sexual minority families.

Vital information on family services, custody, and access rights for gay parents! Queer Families, Common Agendas: Gay People, Lesbians, and Family Values examines the real life experience of those affected by current laws and policies regarding homosexual families. The book will help policy makers, lawyers, social workers, and the general public better understand these families. Here you will be able to compare the progress of policy in the U.S. and Canada for gay and lesbian parents and their children and explore relevant legal approaches in the two countries. In Queer Families, Common Agendas: Gay People, Lesbians, and Family Values, a range of strategies for advancing the rights of sexual minority parents are considered for legal feasibility and political viability. You will gain insight into the contradictions in policies and practices that ultimately disadvantage children based on their family origins, and you will discover alternative approaches for improved services to homosexual families. Queer Families, Common Agendas explores: family law and protection of women-headed households legal definitions of motherhood and fatherhood in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom family and adoption idealogies concerning gay families and their rights to adopt new ways to make social services responsive to minority families the lesbian and gay "agenda" the value of family and the family of values--as opposed to the worn-out phrase "family values" Queer Families, Common Agendas serves as a primer to assist you in understanding the legal struggles that lesbian and gay families are facing today. You will explore concerns about family law, protection of women-headed households, motherhood, fatherhood, adoption and family ideology, and how to make social services responsive to gay and lesbian families. This excellent reference provides you with the necessary background and techniques to create services that are responsive and effective with sexual minority families.

This book addresses the themes of visibility, transgression, and resistance, as well as the intersection between the personal and political in the contexts of relationships, parenthood, and political activism. Giving special attention to families of color, immigrants, and poor families, the authors examine the risks entailed in coming out and the significance of class, race, and sexual and gender identity in this process. Parenting also creates dilemmas of visibility as queer families negotiate malls, schools, and workplaces, as well as the medical, legal, and political institutions that regulate their families.

A new, multidisciplinary look at GLBT parenting Over the past 30 years, research on gay and lesbian parents has produced findings that challenge deeply rooted beliefs in child psychology about the processes through which parents influence the development of their children. Gay and Lesbian Parenting: New Directions builds on this important research with a detailed multidisciplinary examination of established knowledge and emerging information. In addition to evaluating already substantiated findings, this innovative collection marks a turning point in the field by showcasing a new wave of research that examines the dynamics of same-sex parenting and addresses questions about newly emerging concerns such as the consequences of different routes to same-sex parenthood and the effects of social perceptions on gay and lesbian family life. Gay and Lesbian Parenting: New Directions presents an overview of significant developments and suggests future directions for the field. Arranged in four sections, this unique text offers cutting-edge information gathered from both quantitative and qualitative research methods. Section one considers gay and lesbian family formation and the may routes through which lesbians and gay men have become parents. Section two reviews family relationships from parents', and their children's, perspective. The contributions to the third section discuss how gay and lesbian families describe themselves to others. The final section examines the public perceptions held by heterosexuals about lesbian and gay parenting and looks toward possibilities for the future. Chapters in Gay and Lesbian Parenting: New Directions: look at established research and the perspective of gay and lesbian parents and their children on family life explore methodological advances in the research field define the demographics of gay and lesbian parenting and the comparisons of lesbians, gay men, heterosexual women, and heterosexual men without children consider the decisions involved in and the systemic process of donor insemination and surrogacy study gay and lesbian adoptive parents investigate representations of diversity in storybooks for children of gay and lesbian parents situate gay men’s journeys into fatherhood within the sociohistorical context of developments in the United States tell personal stories about the prospect of gay fatherhood present a consideration of the different identities that lesbian and heterosexual mothers construct critically consider the terminology used both within and outside lesbian-parented families to describe a wide variety of co-parenting relationships give an introduction to critical psychology and deconstruct the debate over the importance of paternal influence report findings from a large community survey in Australia on attitudes toward same-sex parenting and beliefs about developmental outcomes and much more! Accessible and detailed, with numerous case studies, bibliographies, tables, and figures, Gay and Lesbian Parenting: New Directions is an ideal resource for students and educators, researchers and professionals working in GLBT and Queer Studies, family therapists, counselors, psychotherapists, social workers, and psychiatrists.

Irrespective of theoretical orientation, families matter. Families are the entity in which children are introduced to words, objects, shapes, and colors. Families are the people related in a myriad of conventional and unconventional ways that clothe, bathe, and feed its biological and acquired offspring. Influenced by race, ethnicity, income, and education, families relate not only to each other within the unit but to others in the neighborhood, the community, and beyond. This book is about families and their children. This book is about those times when the family unit experiences distress. This distress may be found in the serious illness of a child or a parent. It may be the result of a reconfiguration of the family as in divorce and remarriage. Or it may involve the harming of a family member sexually or physically. In this volume, the authors explore what family means today, what functions it serves, and those circumstances that can make family life painful. Importantly, the authors provide readers with clearly written information drawn from the most recent scientific investigations suggesting how the topics in this volume might be addressed to either ease that discomfort (treatment) or prevent its occurrence.

This handbook highlights present-day information and evidence-based knowledge in the field of children’s behavioral health to enable practitioners, families, and others to choose and implement one of many intervention approaches provided. Using a standardized format, best practices for the prevention and treatment of many childhood behavioral disorders are identified based on current research, sound theory, and behavioral trial studies. This revision includes an integration of the DSM-5 diagnostic manual and new chapters on childhood psychosis and military families, and a thorough updating of the research in the previous edition.

Over the past 30 years, research on gay and lesbian parents has produced findings that challenge deeply rooted beliefs in child psychology about the processes through which parents influence the development of their children. Gay and Lesbian Parenting: New Directions builds on this important research with a detailed multidisciplinary examination of established knowledge and emerging information. In addition to evaluating already substantiated findings, this innovative collection marks a turning point in the field by showcasing a new wave of research that examines the dynamics of same-sex parenting and addresses questions about newly emerging concerns such as the consequences of different routes to same-sex parenthood and the effects of social perceptions on gay and lesbian family life.