Being Brave: Negotiating the Path of Social Transition With a Transgender Child in Foster Care

ABSTRACT

A literature review of treatment guidelines regarding children and adolescents with gender dysphoria culminates in consideration of two models: the gender affirmative model and the multidimensional family model. A single case study of a child in foster care in the United Kingdom, from the age of seven to eleven, illustrates the process of social transitioning from the assigned gender to the true gender self. The role of the context of the child in facilitating the process of social transition in the form of school, family, local authority, and the National Health Service is highlighted. Professionals working with gender nonconforming and gender-dysphoric children are encouraged to consider social transitioning as a viable option.     

Toward a Dialectical Model of Family Gender Discourse: Body,Identity, and Sexuality

The goal of this article is to propose a dialectical model representing gender discourse in families. A brief review of literature in sociology, psychology, and gender studies focuses on three dialectical issues: nature versus culture, similarity versus difference, and stability versus fluidity. Deconstructing gender theories from a postmodern feminist perspective, the authors discuss agency and context in families' gender discourse. Narrative excerpts from interviews with an adolescent daughter and her mother illustrate three emergent themes in the social construction of gender: body, identity, and sexuality. The article concludes with recommendations for family researchers.     

Family support in late life: A review of the literature on aging,disability, and family caregiving

ABSTRACT

For older adults and people with disabilities in the United States, family caregiving is an important part of remaining at home and in the community. As care recipients and caregivers age, family dynamics change, and the health, social, and financial impacts of this (largely unremunerated) work have implications for individuals, families, and social policy. In this review, the authors map the literature across multiple fields related to disability and aging to understand caregiving in late life, what it means to be an older caregiver and/or to care for older people. The authors summarize the findings of 97 articles to address the care, services, and supports family caregivers provide for older adults; negative and positive impacts for caregivers serving in this role; supports that family members use or need; and societal impact of family caregiving. Much of the literature describes the work family caregivers provide and negative impacts of caregiving. Less attention is devoted to caregiving benefits, supports used by family caregivers, and societal impacts. The authors conclude with an agenda for future research that attends to the need for research that includes: more diverse samples, new types of caregivers, longitudinal data, qualitative data and analysis, and comparative research.     

‘Strategic (dis)obedience’: Female entrepreneurs reflecting on and acting upon patriarchal practices

It has been suggested that entrepreneurship is a form of emancipation and social change for women. We adopt a more comprehensive view by considering micro‐emancipation at the level of both agency and identity of women entrepreneurs in patriarchal and Islamic societies. We borrow from organization studies literature to draw on the notions of the dynamic and ongoing process between dominators (i.e., men of the patriarchal family) and the dominated (i.e., women entrepreneurs). In this process micro‐emancipation and active obedience are intertwined. For this purpose, we contextualize the study in the United Arab Emirates, where men of the family regulate women's agency and identity. The men of the family are not only the gatekeepers of societal culture, but also the potential supporters for women to navigate the societal arrangements. By adopting an interpretive approach, we analyse the narratives of Emirati female entrepreneurs in their early stages of becoming an entrepreneur who engage in strategic (dis)obedience. The article contributes to the literature on micro‐emancipation in the context of gender and entrepreneurship.     

Sociology and Studies of Gender,Caregiving, and Inequality

This review focuses on scholarship that illuminates the ties between gendered care and persistent gender inequality. After an overview of work on gender and care across the disciplines, it examines sociologies of care and suggests how sociology might further enrich research and theory in this area. I explore the areas of work–family intersection, state care policy, and the organization of paid care work. I argue that the sociology of caregiving needs to better understand institutional effects on care and the interactions that transmit and resist them, organizational influences on paid care work, and how care policies relate to gender equality.     

Transitions to Caregiving,Gender, and Psychological Well‐Being: A Prospective U.S. National Study

Guided by a life course perspective, this study examined the effects of transitioning into caregiving activity for a child, spouse, parent, other relative, or nonkin associate on nine dimensions of psychological well‐being. Data came from adults ages 19–95, who were noncaregiver primary respondents in the National Survey of Families and Households in 1987–88 and who were followed up longitudinally in 1992–93 (N= 8,286). Results from multivariate regression models confirmed that the transition to caregiving for primary kin (i.e., a child, spouse, or biological parent) was associated with an increase in depressive symptoms. However in selected instances, caregiving was associated with beneficial effects (e.g., women who began to provide nonresidential care to a biological parent reported more purpose in life than noncaregiving women). Evidence regarding gender differences was inconsistent, varying across caregiving role relationship types.     

Contextual Influences on Work and Family Roles: Gender,Culture, and Socioeconomic Factors

Multiple factors influence the ways in which men and women combine work and family roles. Career counselors and other career development professionals must be cognizant of the cultural shifts in gender roles and the unique perspectives of younger generations regarding work–family interface. Workplace characteristics, economic trends, and personal values converge to influence decisions related to career, family, and other life roles. Much of the existing literature addressing work–family interface has been conducted in the United States and may not generalize to international populations. In this conceptual article, the authors examine current empirical knowledge and culturally sensitive frameworks for understanding work–family interface across countries and cultures. The authors discuss implications and recommendations for practice based on an integrated conceptualization of the literature.     

Continuity and Change in the Family System Across the Transition from Adolescence to Emerging Adulthood

As adolescents move into emerging adulthood, their social networks shift toward a focus on peers and romantic partners, yet parents and siblings remain important sources of support. The present review takes a family systems approach to integrate the growing body of literature examining longitudinal continuity and change in both positive (e.g., intimacy, support) and negative (e.g., conflict, rivalry) qualities of parent–child and sibling relationships as adolescents transition to emerging adulthood. In general, contact with family members decreases, yet the quality of family relationships appears to improve or, at the very least, stabilize across this transition. These pathways are interpreted within the lens of several prominent theories, and a discussion of the limitations of the current literature and ideas for future research are presented.     

Mentoring and social skills training: ensuring better outcomes for youth in foster care

Youth in foster care face significant life challenges that make it more likely that they will face negative outcomes (i.e., school failure, homelessness, and incarceration). While the reason(s) for out-of-home placement (i.e., family violence, abuse, neglect and/or abandonment) provide some context for negative outcomes, such negative outcomes need not be a foregone conclusion. In fact, interventions created to serve at-risk youth could ostensibly address the needs of youth in foster care as well, given that they often face similar social, emotional, and other challenges. Specifically, the author posits that supporting foster care youth through the use ofmentoring and social skills training could reduce the negative outcomes far too common for many of these youth.     

The Examination of Emotional Facial Expressions Within Parent–Child and Sibling Interactive Contexts: A Systematic Review

This work constitutes a systematic review of the empirical literature about emotional facial expressions displayed in the context of family interaction. Searches of electronic databases from January 1990 until December 2016 generated close to 4400 articles, of which only 26 met the inclusion criteria. Evidence indicate that affective expressions were mostly examined through laboratory and naturalistic observations, within a wide range of interactive contexts in which mother–child dyads significantly outnumbered father–child dyads. Moreover, dyadic partners were found to match each others’ displays and positive and neutral facial expressions proving more frequent than negative facial expressions. Finally, researchers observed some developmental and gender differences regarding the frequency, intensity, and category of emotional displays and identified certain links among facial expression behavior, family relations, personal adjustment, and peer-related social competence.     

Support,Demands, and Gender Ideology: Exploring Work–Family Facilitation and Work–Family Conflict Among Older Workers

Only recently have researchers begun to investigate issues surrounding the work experiences of individuals in late midlife. This article contributes to the literature on work–family facilitation and conflict among older workers. I focus specifically on the extent to which gender ideology is associated with facilitation and conflict and whether that relationship differs for women and men. Using a sample of older workers (n = 2,253), I find that gender traditional respondents are more likely to report work–family conflict than are nontraditional respondents, with no corresponding association for work–family facilitation. There are no sex differences in the effect of gender ideology on facilitation or conflict. Results are discussed in the context of the importance of understanding the work–family interface among older employees.     

Revisiting Perceiver and Target Gender Effects in Deception Detection

Existing research is inconclusive regarding the influence of perceiver gender and target gender on lie detection. Researchers have offered a number of conclusions regarding gender effects in deception detection (e.g., women are better at lie detection than men, participant and target gender interact in predicting deception detection accuracy, there are no gender effects in deception detection). In the current work, we revisit the question of whether and how gender influences lie detection, employing a large database of controlled stimuli, a large sample size, and the analytical advantages provided by signal detection theory. Participants viewed videos of male and female targets telling truths and lies about interpersonal relationships, and after each video, they rendered a truth or lie judgment. Female targets were easier to “read” (i.e., greater sensitivity) and were called liars more frequently than male targets. No effects of participant gender were observed. This work sheds light on an important issue in the lie detection literature (i.e., does gender matter?), and it identifies important considerations for understanding gender biases and cross-gender social interactions.     

Caught Between Love and Money: The Experiences of Paid Family Caregivers

This paper considers the experiences of family home care providers, paid an hourly wage by California’s In Home Supportive Services program to care for disabled or elderly relatives. These caregivers are unique in that they provide care in what Arlie Hochschild calls the “third sector” of social life, where norms and responsibilities tied to work and family intersect. Drawing on in-depth interviews and ethnographic observations of family home care providers, we find that providers perceive their paid caregiving as deviant behavior that violates social norms surrounding family care, i.e. that people should not be paid for the care of kin. Family caregivers manage the norm violation associated with their carework by offering “accounts” that 1) emphasize the tasks and skill associated with caregiving and 2) by framing their carework as a public good that benefits the larger community. These accounts allow family providers to distance themselves from the norm violation of receiving a wage for care and to reconstruct their actions in a positive light.     

IS WORK THE NEW NEIGHBORHOOD? Social Ties in the Workplace,Family, and Neighborhood

The work–family literature emphasizes how work intrudes into family life, and some scholars suggest that social ties based in the workplace may be replacing ties to family or neighbors. Using data from the Ecology of Careers Panel Study, we describe the prevalence of strong ties with family, coworkers, and neighbors in a dual‐earner, middle‐class sample. We also examine which respondents are more likely to have strong ties in the workplace. We find that most respondents do not have any strong ties with coworkers; however, coworker ties are much more common than ties to neighbors. Additionally, there are gender differences in network ties and these differences may have important consequences for social support.     

South African social workers' knowledge of attachment theory and their perceptions of attachment relationships in foster care supervision

Despite the prominence of attachment theory in international foster care literature and the importance of attachment relationships in successful foster care, attachment theory and practices do not feature prominently in South African foster care research. Against this backdrop, we interviewed twenty South African social workers' about their knowledge of attachment theory and their perceptions of attachment relationships in their own foster care work. Thematic analysis was used to analyse the interviews. We found that the social workers had limited knowledge of attachment theory and interventions; experienced most biological parents as unmotivated to improve their circumstances and attachment relationships with children; indicated that family reunifications were rare occurrences; reported foster parents were mostly kin; and experienced constraining contextual factors that hindered optimal consideration of attachment relationships in foster care supervision.     

On shifting ground: First-time parents’ ideal world of paid work and family time

We examined first-time fathers’ and mothers’ perspectives about their ideal world of support in the context of dominant social ideology, ethno-cultural ideals, and the pragmatics of their everyday family, workplace, and socioeconomic circumstances during their first 18 months as parents. Twelve Canadian-born and six Chinese immigrant couples participated in individual in-depth interviews. We conducted a three-part analysis: fathers’ perspectives, mothers’ perspectives, and couples’ perspectives. Fathers focused on fulfilling dual fathering ideals of ‘time with family’ and ‘providing for family’; mothers emphasized fulfilling a mothering ideal of ‘caring for children'. Examining couples’ perspectives revealed a more nuanced understanding of their shared focus on ‘caring for family'. Parents in this study found the current social ideal of the ‘new’ father, who is both financial provider and nurturing co-parent, appealing, yet difficult to achieve. Couples wanted informal (i.e. family and social network) support, along with formal (i.e. workplace and childcare) support to enable them to provide family care and financial stability for their family. Findings contribute to understanding family and paid work experiences and decision-making among couples as new parents. We offer insights into the complexity of intersections among social ideals, personal expectations, family care, and paid work for fathers and mothers.     

Gender equality and family changes in the work–family culture in Southern Europe1

The wider context of the trade-off between work and family is not just a matter of changing preferences. The focus of the literature in this area has been strongly concerned with the identification of factors promoting high levels of female employment than with the location of policy determinants of cross-national fertility variation. Work–family reconciliation is considered as a political action that gives quite limited and unstable support to encourage women’s labour market participation, this results in the poor development of external services and in fewer benefits for women, who have to undertake multiple roles inside and outside the family. The Southern European countries (SEC) model take a specific family-oriented approach to work–family reconciliation. They are family-oriented in that they entrust the family with more responsibilities that in other countries and take a conservative/corporatist-family-oriented approach to work–family reconciliation. The key role and the interconnection between fertility and employment among women, as well as the influence of the gender system and, on the whole, of the welfare system depend on the specific culture of different countries. Based on these theoretical premises, this paper reviews the academic discussion of the meaning of work–family balance concept in the cultural context of SEC from a comparative perspective, taking in account the gender equality debate.     

Productivity or Gender? The Impact of Domestic Tasks Across the Wage Distribution

This article assesses the wage impact of domestic tasks across women's and men's wage distributions given the cross‐distribution variation in unpaid work time. The productivity–volume versus the gender–class normative argument developed here suggests competing hypotheses. Analyses of pooled 2010–2015 waves of the American Time Use Survey using unconditional quantile regression revealed that an increase in the lesser time women at the top of the wage distribution spent doing routine housework predicted a smaller wage penalty than at the bottom of women's wage distribution. Conversely, men at the top of their wage distribution spent the least time doing routine tasks, but incurred the largest penalty for an increase in that time. Increases in nonroutine housework or child‐care time did not negatively affect the wage distributions of women or most men. Results supported the volume–productivity argument for routine housework among women, but a gender–class normative argument for men.     

A Preliminary Analysis of Associations Among Ethnic–Racial Socialization,Ethnic Discrimination,and Ethnic Identity Among Urban Sixth Graders

Drawing from cultural ecological models of adolescent development, the present research investigates how early adolescents received ethnic–racial socialization from parents as well as how experiences of ethnic and racial discrimination are associated with their ethnic identity (i.e., centrality, private regard, and public regard). Data for this study were drawn from a multimethod study of ethnically and socioeconomically diverse early adolescents in three mid‐ to high‐achieving schools in New York City. After accounting for the influences of race/ethnicity, social class, gender, immigrant status, and self‐esteem, parental ethnic–racial socialization was associated with higher levels of ethnic centrality (i.e., the extent to which youth identify themselves in terms of their group), more positive private regard (i.e., feelings about one's own ethnic group), and public regard (i.e., perceptions of other people's perceptions of their ethnic group). Ethnic discrimination from adults at school and from peers was associated with more negative perceptions of one's ethnic group (i.e., public regard). In addition, the association of ethnic–racial parent socialization and ethnic identity beliefs was stronger for those who reported higher levels of adult discrimination. Results highlight key ways in which ethnic identity may be shaped by the social ecologies in which adolescents are embedded.