The Development and Initial Validation of the COPLAG Scale: Measuring the Concerns of Parents of Lesbians and Gays

This article discusses the development and initial validation of a scale designed to assess parents’ concerns upon their learning about their children's gay or lesbian sexual orientations. Principal Component Analysis (PCA) of the scale's items resulted in a three-factor solution distinguishing among parental concerns about (1) their children's physical, psychological, and social well-being, (2) themselves as parents of gay or lesbian children, and (3) being rejected by loved ones.     

DEPENDENCE AND INDEPENDENCE

The contributions that adult men and women make to households in terms of paid and unpaid work have undergone substantial change, particularly in respect of women's responsibility for income generation, and have been seen as part of the processes of individualization. Recent contributions to the literature have suggested that children are now acquiring independence earlier as part of those same processes. The paper uses qualitative methods to explore the way in which parents in two-parent families, where both are employed, perceive the risks attached to children's exercise of greater independence, how they seek to ‘manage’ those risks and how far the perceptions of parents accord with those of children. We find parents’ perceptions of risk to be strong, but to have little to do with working patterns. In addition, they are often at odds with the actual behaviour of the child. Risks are managed by negotiation, in which children played an active part. We are also able to make some preliminary comments on the difficulties of interpreting scale measures in relation to interview evidence.     

Family Social Work:

A critical constructionist approach to family services is proposed as a useful framework for family social work. An outline of the foundations and basic ideas of critical constructionism are presented. These ideas are then applied to social work with families. Some practice implications are discussed.     

The satisfaction of Finnish adoptive parents with statutory pre-adoption counselling in inter-country adoptions

We examined how satisfied Finnish adoptive parents were with statutory pre-adoption counselling in inter-country adoptions. The data were collected through the Finnish Adoption Study using a retrospective survey measuring satisfaction with received pre-adoption counselling. All adoptive parents with a child under the age of 18, adopted from abroad between the years 1990 and 2007, were included. The sample of the study comprised parents of 1451 children and a total response rate of 55.7% was achieved. The data consisted of self-scored reports of satisfaction as well as open answer questions. Parent satisfaction and associated variables were analysed using chi-square and multiple logistic regression. Of the respondents, 81.7% reported satisfaction with the pre-adoption counselling they had received. The level of satisfaction was stable over time and did not differ according to service provider, whereas family type and sending country were associated with satisfaction. However the explanations for satisfaction were different for those services provided in units specialized in adoption and for those provided by municipal child protection services. The components found to explain satisfaction and dissatisfaction were experience, adoption knowledge, and attitude of the social worker, service accessibility and availability issues, as well as the content of the pre-adoption counselling offered.     

Explorative study into support needs of caregivers in short-term foster care regarding problem behaviour and dealing with biological parents

Family supporting foster care (FSFC) is a directly accessible, short-term and preventive form of foster care for children under the age of 12. Caregivers in this type of foster care need comprehensive support to deal with their complex tasks. In this contribution, the support needs arising from the behaviour of the foster child as well as concerning dealing with the biological parents of 85 Flemish FSFC-parents are examined, as these are areas FSFC-parents specifically ask support for. These support needs are evaluated for possible links with child and foster parent characteristics. More experienced foster parents and foster parents with a foster child showing more externalising problem behaviour ask for more support in managing the child's behaviour.     

(Not) Taking Account of Precarious Employment: Workfare Policies and Lone Mothers in Ontario and the UK

Workfare is, at least in part, a policy response to changing labour markets and the expansion taking place in jobs that are low‐paid, irregular and insecure. For lone mothers, increasingly the focus of workfare policies, precarious employment creates special challenges. However, the nature of the jobs that are available to women on social assistance has received relatively little attention in the workfare literature, which focuses more on individual characteristics, supports to employment, and programme impacts. Drawing upon both primary and secondary sources and using Ontario, the province with the most developed workfare programme in Canada, this article examines the ways in which policies support and enforce precarious employment. The article also considers the implications of precarious employment for UK policy, which has not (yet) adopted workfare for lone mothers, although incremental steps in that direction are taking place as employment is increasingly viewed as the appropriate objective of income support programmes for lone mothers.     

Temporal Discrimination and Parents with Learning Difficulties in the Child Protection System

This article shows how time works against parents with learningdifficulties in the child protection system and Children Actproceedings. The prevailing wisdom, embedded in policy and theliterature, is that delay in care cases is bad for the childand may jeopardize his or her future. This paper shows how thepressure to avoid delay might itself be harming some families,especially parents with learning difficulties. Drawing on interviewswith social work practitioners undertaken as part of a largerstudy, the authors describe the various forms of temporal discriminationthat impact on this group of disabled parents. They concludethat procedural time limits make it harder for parents withlearning difficulties to meet the standards and expectationsenforced by Children’s Services and the courts.     

Child Support, Fatherhood, and Marriage: Findings from the First 5 Years of the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study

In this article, we review what has been learned to date from the first 5 years of the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing study about child support, fatherhood, and marriage. The article first describes the parents' circumstances at the time of the child's birth, then examines the trajectories of parents' relationships (with each other and others), fathers' financial contributions and other indicators of fathers' involvement with their children 5 years later; and finally reviews what has been learned about the effect of child support enforcement on these three aspects of families' lives. We find that most unmarried parents are either cohabiting or romantically involved at the time of the child's birth, but are a distinctly disadvantaged group as compared with married parents. Five years later, most of these parents are no longer romantically involved, however, most of the fathers are still seeing their children on a regular basis, and about half are contributing either formally or informally to their support. Strong child support enforcement appears to increase formal and decrease informal support from fathers, reduce marriage among parents, and have a weak positive effect on father involvement. More research is necessary to understand whether these findings are robust over time and across samples of unmarried parents.     

Parents Beyond Borders: A Social Group Work Curriculum for Supporting Immigrant Parents and Building Solidarity

Parents Beyond Borders, a curriculum first implemented in 2008 as part of The Center for Family Life's ParentShip Program, encourages group members to create a shared narrative about their traumatic immigration experiences. The result is twofold. First, immigrant parents gain a more assertive and poignant voice to communicate with family and others in their lives when sharing their family's acculturation experience. Second, because social group work promotes recognition of collective trauma due to the community's experience of marginalization, it improves members' group self-concept and empowers them to take action and advocate for themselves.     

Parents' Marital Status,Father-Daughter Intimacy and Young Adult Females' Dating Relationships

Abstract

The affective relationships of young adult females and their fathers were investigated for effects on dating relationships, dating anxiety, and interpersonal trust. Ninety-six college females, 66 with married parents and 25 with divorced parents, completed questionnaires about father-daughter intimacy, dating satisfaction, dating anxiety, and; trust. It was hypothesized that females with divorced vs. married parents, and females scoring lower on the intimacy scale, regardless of family structure, would experience less father-daughter intimacy, lower dating satisfaction and trust, and higher dating anxiety. Multivariate analysis of variance showed that females with divorced vs. married parents experienced significantly less intimacy with their fathers but similar levels of trust, anxiety, and satisfaction. Comparisons of females high and low in father-daughter intimacy showed no differences in trust, anxiety, or dating satisfaction. The relative importance of parents' marital status versus other factors relevant to divorce (e.g., intimacy, presence of a stepfather) will be discussed.