HELPING ALIENATED CHILDREN WITH FAMILY BRIDGES: PRACTICE, RESEARCH, AND THE PURSUIT OF "HUMBITION"

This article briefly summarizes and responds to feedback offered by Joan Kelly regarding Family Bridges: A Workshop for Troubled and Alienated Parent–Child Relationships™. We emphasize principles that promote an educational atmosphere, as opposed to a therapeutic one, and the court's role in contributing to successful interventions with severely alienated children. Among the considerations discussed are: working with favored parents, economic comparisons of Family Bridges with counseling approaches, modifying the program for use in prevention and with milder cases of alienation, and issues related to training additional team leaders and conducting outcome research.     

家庭暴力的内涵界定及趋势分析

狭义的家庭暴力是亲密伴侣之间存在的暴力行为。广义的家庭暴力的主体范围可以扩展到家庭成员之间。家庭暴力的行为内容包括身体暴力、经济暴力、精神暴力、性暴力、心理暴力等。由于家庭暴力本身所具有的行为隐秘性以及起诉率低等特点,使得家庭暴力的遏制存在很大的难题。同时,家庭暴力中以暴制暴现象日益突出。因此有必要加强家庭暴力的预防与治理,以促进家庭和睦与社会和谐。     

Family Support Groups for family members of mentally ill offenders: a pilot study

To date, there is a lack of family interventions for family members of persons with a mental illness who offended (PMIO). With the aim of addressing this issue, a Family Support Group (FSG) has been developed. The current pilot study investigated the impact of two pilot FSGs for family members of PMIO in relation to quality of life, burden, coping strategies, and resilience. Family members completed several questionnaires (i.e. WHOQOL-BREF, ZBI-22, CERQ, RS-nl) both before and after the group intervention. A total of 20 family members participated in both FSGs. The results indicated that participants experienced less self-blame, a decrease in loss of control over their lives, and improved emotional well-being. The findings showed that attending an FSG can be empowering for family members as it offers support in the management of emotional experiences and coping strategies.     

Custody and Visitation in Families With Three (or More) Parents

New technological and legal developments have enabled the formation of three‐parent families. Now that these families have arrived, families—and family law—must adapt to allocate responsibilities among the responsible adults.     

Becoming widowed

This article discusses the characteristics of widowhood in early 19th-century Austria, focusing on the sources of economic support. Higher proportions of the widowed population were found in inmate than in tenant households, and more women than men were widowed. Widows were more likely to live on their own than adults in general were, indicating that many widows could support their households from their own resources. For 40% of the widows, however, familial support was available in the form of a coresident extended household. Tenant households with greater resources at their disposal were better able to offer this form of support than inmate households. Less than 1% of tenant widows lived alone. Longitudinal data were analyzed to determine the relative frequency with which tenant and inmate widows succeeded their late husbands as household heads, remarried, or retired to become the mothers or mothers-in-law of the new household heads.     

Family succession through adoption in the Chosun Dynasty

Using a unique data source of genealogies of upper-status families, called Bulcheonwye families, we assess how the extent of family succession through adoption changed over five centuries from 1450 to 1949 in Korea. Our analysis shows the continued increase in the share of adopted sons among total family successors up to the end of the 19th century when three out of ten family successors were adopted. The trend of the increasing role of adoption is closely related to the declining number of sons per family, suggesting that not only the rising influence of Confucian culture but also demographic changes increased the demand for adoption. Finally, our comparison provides evidence that the likelihood of achieving high social status was significantly higher among adopted sons than biological ones, suggesting that the socioeconomic potential of adopted sons could be an important factor for adoption decision.     

Migration and the household: Urban living arrangements in late 19th- to early 20th-century Russia

Examining population census data for the late 19th and early 20th century, this article examines the impact of rural–urban migration during the first wave of Russia's industrialization on urban living arrangements. The author finds effects that echo the experience of other industrializing nations, notably the proliferation of board and lodging arrangements, and phenomena that are more peculiar to the Russian situation. Notably, the system of landholding and associated legal and fiscal constraints complicated migrants' separation from the village and put a premium on cyclical and return migration rather than outright urbanization. These conditions were conducive to the formation of collective non-family households of labour migrants, artely, which were an important mechanism for cutting living expenses and increasing the share of earnings remitted to the village and the family household back home.     

The urban household in Russia and the Soviet Union, 1900–2000: Patterns of family formation in a turbulent century

Starting from census data on co-residence and household composition, the authors analyse principles of family organisation and family formation in twentieth-century urban Russia and the Soviet Union. The article uses an adapted version of the classification of households developed by Peter Laslett and Eugene Hammel to study variation in household structure for successive population censuses. Changes in this variation between cross-sections are explained with the help of additional quantitative and qualitative data and are linked to the fundamental demographic, social and economic shifts which took place in Russian society in the course of the twentieth century. The article finds a family system characterised by a tendency towards nuclear family formation, but incorporating a fairly stable element of household extension. Co-residence of three generations was both an answer to a perennial housing problem and offered important advantages in the sphere of childcare and care for the elderly. Variation and fluctuation in household structure are found to be most pronounced during the turbulent first half of the century. After a period of stability during the post-war decades of Soviet rule, post-Soviet transformations provoke new changes.     

Vulnerability among paupers: Determinants of individuals receiving poor relief in nineteenth-century northern Sweden

This study combines computerized parish registers with parish meeting records that account for individuals who received poor relief in the nineteenth-century Sundsvall region, Sweden. The combination of sources especially helps to explore the recipients who are overlooked in the literature or difficult to trace in historical data. Their demographic characteristics in relation to relief allocation and experiences prior to it are analyzed and show that they did not only share the occurrence of entitlement. Vast but insufficient family networks failed to give the recipients support to manage their distressed situation. Deaths and births of relatives jeopardized their capability to guarantee subsistence for them or their family, and so did also their gender and phase in the lifecycle. The multi-dimensional concept of vulnerability is employed to comprehend the dynamic determinants of poverty represented by individuals granted poor relief. It is argued that this concept has to be further developed but nevertheless helps to identify and stratify some of the vulnerabilities that characterized paupers in the past.     

Labor strategies of families: An introduction

The collection presents an approach to history in which the dominance of structure is replaced by the effects of human agency. Individual motives and actions are the subject of these studies. In particular, the articles focus on the economic approach of family strategies, starting with a methodological discussion of the problematic concept of strategies: how to disentangle the influence of social structure, family circumstances, and individual behavior. The conflicting interests of individuals resulted in replacing the so-called “joint utility function” with that of “bargained family decisions.” The focus of the contributions is on the labor deployment of family members. All articles deal with three factors influencing labor deployment: adaptation to the structural environment, regulation of labor within the family, and reconciliation of choices at transition points during the individual life course of family members.